Lily the Vietnamese Psychiatrist – VietNOLA – It’s New Orleans
Generally speaking, Vietnamese people – particularly the older generation – don’t go to counselors, they don’t see life coaches, and they sure as hell don’t see shrinks. It’s not that they don’t have problems (like the rest of us), but for various reasons, they tend to deal with them on their own, and that’s one of the things that makes this week’s guest, Lily Ngotran Moghtader, a Tulane psychiatry resident, so interesting.
Lily is Vietnamese – and to give an indication of what we’re talking about, when she decided on psychiatry as her area of specialty, her traditional Vietnamese mother “flipped out” and said: “Oh my god, you’re going to turn crazy like your patients!” (This being the same mother who, upon hearing Lily was dating a Persian Jew – the man who is now her husband – exclaimed: “Oh my god, you’re dating a terrorist!”)
This week Lily joins us on VietNOLA to talk about the challenges of practicing psychiatry in a Vietnamese community, about the secret to successfully navigating a romance between two distinctly ethnic families, and about her experience (as someone now steeped in western medicine) of growing up in a household where getting scraped on the back with a coin (cao gio) was the go-to treatment for someone with a cold or a flu.