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Description
A podcast that focuses on conversations & stories around Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) maternal mental health, hosted by Taiwanese American mothers Peggy (LCSW, PMH-C) & Jasmine (PharmD, PMH-C) who are also postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety survivors.
Mental health is not talked about enough in our AAPI communities, and we want to break these stigmas especially for mothers and partners. As AAPI healthcare providers who personally struggled during postpartum and are now perinatal mental health certified, we want to see more representation of other AAPI parents who know how important it is to take care of our mental health.
We talk with AAPI guests about a variety of themes in mental health and parenting, particularly what that looks like through the lens of our culture within the Western world. There are also discussions with professionals in the field, to help our providers and allies. We're not afraid to talk about the hard things that might seem taboo. We hope this podcast reminds you that you are not alone in your struggles as an AAPI parent!
If you'd like to support our cause or subscribe for exclusive bonus episodes, please check out this link to support or subscribe! https://www.buzzsprout.com/2401277/subscribe
54 Episodes
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Today’s guest will be talking about the topic of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) , which is a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that requires medical intervention. Raag Malhotra is a PMH-C certified perinatal mental health therapist who transformed her own journey through postpartum depression and HG across two pregnancies into a mission to support mothers navigating their darkest moments. Raag is a mother of two and brings a unique lens of experiencing one pregnancy in India ...
Join us in this episode as we explore the inspiring journey of Michele Elizaga, a Filipina American single mom by choice. Michele shares her decision to embrace motherhood on her own terms and defy societal expectations of needing to be partnered to have a baby. It started on her 40th birthday in Costa Rica where she had a pivotal conversation with a good friend that led her to consider having a child without a partner and pursue fertility options. What started as a wild idea turned into a fa...
In this episode, Stella Falkner shares her inspiring journey from postpartum mental health struggles to creating and founding Dowa, a platform that bridges community support with clinical care for mothers. We dive into Stella’s personal experiences through postpartum that led her to discovering she had complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and how she started healing from this. Stella tells us about how C-PTSD is different from PTSD because it arises from not one singular traumatic ...
On today's episode, we dive into the often-overlooked topic of mental health among AAPI men. Our guest is John Wang, the award-winning author of Big Asian Energy. John with us shares his personal journey of overcoming burnout and redefining his identity, highlighting the cultural challenges faced by AAPI men in seeking mental health support and honoring where they come from without losing who they are becoming. We explore the impact of societal expectations, the model minority myth, imposter ...
In this episode, we had the extreme pleasure of interviewing New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, Joanna Ho. Many of you may know her from her children's books like Eyes that Kiss in the Corners or even her young adult novel The Silence that Binds Us. Joanna tells us about how her passion for equity, inclusion, and social justice led her to eventually writing the dozen plus books she has published to date in an unexpected departure from her previous jobs. She shares how a...
Last February (2025), we sat down with co-founders Soo-Jin Lee and Linda Yoon of Yellow Chair Collective as guests ourselves for the first time as a duo on the Yellow Chair Collective podcast! We focused on the topic of Eldest Daughters and the traits that typically embody. Linda and Soo Jin were gracious enough to share the podcast recording with us so that we could share it more directly with our listeners too at some point. And that is what today's episode is! For those of you who are newe...
For the final episode of the year, we have the pleasure of talking to another reproductive psychiatrist on the show! (Check out Episode 17 if you want more details on debunking myths for perinatal psychiatric medications). In this episode, we talk with Dr. Kristin Yeung Lasseter, a Board-Certified Psychiatrist based in Texas who specializes in Reproductive Psychiatry and Women’s Mental Health. Dr. Lasseter opens up to us about her experience with postpartum anxiety after the birth...
Maternal mental health goes beyond just the immediate postpartum period and that we know that as we learn to parent, our mental health is also affected by the way we parent. We love talking about breaking generational cycles in parenting because we think, especially as AAPI parents, that is one of the keys to achieving better mental health in the long run. So for today's episode, we talked with the two clinical psychologist co-founders of Modern Asian Parent, Dr. Michelle Chung and Dr. Laura ...
*Special Thanks to our sound engineer Dr. Tony Huynh, PharmD for helping us edit this episode and introducing us to Dr. Jenny Kim* *Trigger Warning: This episode discusses infant loss.* We had the honor of interviewing our guest today on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day last month (October 15) to hold space for her story and loss. Dr. Jenny Kim, PharmD, BCPPS is a Chinese American board-certified pediatric pharmacy specialist who has worked in the NICU, PICU, and CVICU for almost 10 ...
We had the great pleasure of talking with Kriti Lodha in today's episode about her postpartum story that surrounds the highly stigmatized and misunderstood topic of postpartum psychosis, which can affect 1 to 2 in 1000 women. While Kriti didn't have noticeable risk factors for postpartum psychosis, her experience with being a first-time pandemic mom while also grappling with the postpartum mental health emergency has profoundly affected and shaped her motherhood journey and career path going ...
We've had several guests on the podcast talk about postpartum depression, but fewer have notably admitted or recognized depression during pregnancy too. In today's episode, our guest Serein Wu shares about how she was worried about postpartum depression with her mental health history going into motherhood, but she did not expect to have prenatal depression while she was pregnant too. Serein goes into depth sharing her story about the complicated emotions of losing her mother, who she shared a...
In today's episode, we sit down with Shivani Berry, CEO and Founder of Career Mama, to talk about the raw realities of balancing career and motherhood. Shivani is a Harvard MBA, a LinkedIn Top Voice in Leadership, and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Nasdaq. But more importantly, she is a mom of two who has lived through burnout, identity shifts and even a near-death experience just days after giving birth to her second child. Shivani shares candidly about the identit...
Peggy and Jasmine are back for a third season of Healing the Tigress! This opening episode goes over a few updates and recaps, and we also answer some listener questions that we collected from you guys! One of the biggest updates over the summer is that we've switched to Buzzsprout Subscriptions! This is a way that you can give us a little more support if you resonate with our mission to continue to destigmatize mental health and open up more conversations in this space for AAPI parents....
On our final episode of the season, we were thrilled to interview another AAPI mom duo, who host a podcast named "Not a Tiger Mom Podcast." We have been wanting to bring on AAPI moms who identify as neurodivergent or are raising neurodivergent children, and both of these moms identify as neurodivergent themselves AND are raising autistic children AND work with neurodivergent children in their careers (behavioral analyst and speech therapist)! Jenny Lai, MA, BCBA and Bettina Lopez-Lam, MS, CCC...
In this episode, we explore how doulas or birthkeepers can be so powerful and helpful during the birthing and postpartum experience with Leonora Ilovea Willis. Leonora is a native-born Samoan, born on the island of Tutuila in the great Pacific ocean, but who is practicing and working in diaspora as a Birthkeeper, childbirth educator, lactation education specialist, perinatal yoga teacher and bodyworker, serving her community in Oakland and the greater Bay Area. She owns and operates her own b...
May is AAPI Heritage Month and also Maternal Mental Health month, and what better cross section to represent these things than our podcast! For this special month, we have the absolute pleasure and honor of interviewing Dr. Jenny T. Wang, PhD. Many of you may know of Dr. Jenny, but for those who do not, she is a Taiwanese American clinical psychologist speaker, and author on the intersections of Asian American identity, mental health, and intergenerational trauma. We were able to talk t...
In this heartfelt episode, our guest Elise Ruiz-Hom, a Portland-based new mom, shares the powerful story of her and her wife Lydia’s years-long journey to parenthood. Raised in a multicultural, biracial family in Hawai'i, Elise reflects on how her identity has shaped her worldview—especially as a white-passing Asian woman navigating life on the mainland. She takes us through their emotional fertility journey: from Lydia’s eight failed IUIs and three rounds of IVF—including traumatic pro...
Among our AAPI community, it can feel like not enough people talk about the neurodivergent population and how it can impact their families and communities because of a heavy stigma–a stigma that echoes the one around talking about mental health. Our guest for this episode is Clarissa Chui, LCSW, a second generation Chinese American therapist, who works as care coordinator with families who have children diagnosed on the spectrum--specifically autism spectrum. We talk about how her own p...
Of all the perinatal mental health disorders, postpartum psychosis is considered a medical emergency and absolutely requires treatment. It affects 1 to 2 in 1000 mothers and is often misunderstood. On this episode, our guest is Jigyna Patel, a South Asian mom of 3 girls from Houston, Texas. Her perinatal story spans over 10 years, including many different layers: the cultural stigma South Asians mom feel, the struggles of having a surprise twin pregnancy, being undiagnosed with postpart...
On today's episode, we sit down and talk about breastfeeding and mental health with Anhoni Patel, the founder of the popular Mrs. Patel's Ayurvedic Treats and Teas for lactation and pregnancy support. Anhoni started her small business in 2012 while 4 months postpartum with her second child to make Ayurvedic inspired treats and teas to support pregnancy, lactation, and women's health. She shares with us how these time-tested Ayurvedic recipes have been passed down for generations in her family...
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