Photo: MindSite News, used under CC BY-ND 4.0
Paul Hoang was seven years old when he fled Vietnam by boat in 1987, surviving pirate attacks and months in refugee camps before his family resettled in Southern California in 1989. He grew up to become a clinical social worker — and in 2008, he founded Viet-CARE to close a mental-health gap he saw in his own community.
Since then, Viet-CARE has trained more than 1,000 professionals in crisis-intervention and involuntary-hold protocols, organized statewide mental-health conferences for Asian and Pacific Islander communities, and Hoang himself now serves as a crisis responder and hostage negotiator alongside local police departments.
What began as one refugee’s effort to fill a gap in care for people like his own family has grown into a resource for an entire region — proof that understanding a crisis often starts with having lived through one.
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MindSite News — Read the original article