Christine Amog is a mental health professional working with Wraparound services and is dedicated to supporting at-risk and BIPOC youth. She is an advocate for generational healing, safe spaces, and having honest conversations about mental health.
Amog has a unique background in psychology and education, a decision shaped by her own lived experiences. She wants to “[make] the learning experience better for other people.”
She also states that “[she likes] learning about people and knowing why they do what they do.” This decision has impacted her advocacy in mental health, and she has “witnessed a lot of cracks in the system when it came to approaching these fields.”
She has experience in foster care and residential group homes, as well as working with Wraparound Services, a team that works to stabilize families and provide support to children through systems such as foster care and probation.
As a care coordinator, she “[checks] in with families every month” to learn about the “kind of resources they need” … “to help provide interventions that are unique to kids, their parents, and their siblings.” Through her work, she feels like she sees “a different lens of treatment.” She now sees clients of many ages and sees her work in action in wider settings, including families and schools.
She also recalled a moment in advocacy with a foster youth that has stuck with her and continues to shape her. The child was labelled as treatment-resistant and reluctant to talk to anyone. She states that “a lot of people assume youth are going to be resistant and throw an attitude.”
But she “leaned into that kid’s mystery.” She was curious to learn more about him because all he did was listen to music, dance, and rap in silence. She wanted to find out why people weren’t able to support him in the way he needed.
So she bonded with the kid by dancing along with him while he was “rapping in silence. And eventually he let [her] into his music and shared his earphones.”
She stated that this was used as a coping skill to calm down and even resulted in him “stepping down to a lower level of care.” She also “[advocated] for him in the sense of empowering him to use his tools” … “to show others that he really was trying.”
She noted that these stories make her feel fulfilled with knowing the way her work can empower kids to move through life in “their own way.” She also recalled that her “work in mental health opened [her] eyes to a lot of cultural implications that need to be considered in treating clients.”
This had encouraged her to reflect on how her own culture had impacted her as a Filipino-American. In doing so, this “broadened [her] perspective from hyperfixating on generational trauma to approaching wounds with self-compassion and forgiveness.”
This led her to the idea of generational healing, which she finds to be “an empowering way of tending to our wounds, both personally and in [her] work life as a mental health provider.”
With BIPOC youth, she sees a pattern of “shutting down” during difficult times. She feels like this is due to multiple factors, including the “need to present as ‘put-together’ especially in a society where BIPOC individuals are already disadvantaged” … “because of the way [they] look and/or speak.”
Amog believes in the importance of considering these factors in accessing their “inner voices.” She also notes that “ancestral wounds and generational healing tools” are part of that voice. She has seen that with her clients, there is a lot of “compassion that goes into listening to both sides” and that it is “worth the effort it takes” … “to break harmful cycles.
Moving on to generational healing, she stated that it “has been such an empowering way of looking at the pain people have gone through.” She believes it’s a way to help people move through hardships, especially as parents try to build awareness of situations around them to support their kids.
She also stated that as a provider, working with younger people has healed her as well. When she sees kids just being kids and “looking past their suffering,” she realizes that healing comes in many ways and that “we can find pockets of it everywhere.”
She remembered that when she had struggled with her own mental health, she found healing places on online pages such as the Asian Mental Health Project on Instagram. These pages provide links to “therapy and getting affordable means of support.”
She states that to move from safe spaces to healing spaces is to not only be non-judgmental and show up, but to find “humanness in each other and lift each other up.”
If anything were possible, Amog wishes that she could see more affordable mental health care tailored to BIPOC mental health and other marginalized communities.
She believes that “we are starting to move toward a world where people can talk about [mental health] more openly than ten years ago.” She is hopeful because of the progress being made and is excited about what can “come to fruition soon.”
This piece is part of Project Awaaz (founded by Aditi Ediga), a teen-led series on mental health and culture.
