The Breaking Silences Team was formed in September 2020 as fellows of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Clinical Scholars (CS) Program, a national leadership development program for teams of health providers. Jian (Lily) Chen, RN, MA, had been working with Weiyang Xie, PhD on mental health awareness through United Chinese Americans, a national nonprofit movement dedicated to empowering Chinese American communities through civic engagement. They eventually joined forces with Justin Chen, MD, MPH, and Juliana Chen, MD, psychiatrists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who had been working to bridge the academic-community divide in Asian American mental health through their leadership of the nonprofit volunteer-operated MGH Center for Cross-Cultural Student Emotional Wellness. As a combination of immigrant and American-born Chinese American mental health clinicians and educators, our team is passionate about addressing the unique mental health challenges and disparities facing our communities. We have and will continue to attempt to tackle these “wicked problems” before and after the CS funding ends via our parent organizations.
