She wants to create a dinner table atmosphere with her videos, she said.
And with the rise of TikTok, younger generations of Korean Americans have become much more open to therapy — and they are dragging their parents to seek help, Yeom said. In fact, Lee said therapists sometimes need to talk their young clients out of their TikTok-based self-diagnosis. “Teens will come and they will say, ‘I have a [post-traumatic stress disorder],’ and we have to reverse that.”
“It’s kind of like a confluence of puberty, peer pressure, social media, technology and the pandemic. All those things are happening at the same time,” Kim said. “Here, I thought I was starting a community journalism program, but I needed a mental health protocol.” Initially, Zoom was a foreign concept — especially for older immigrants since the application was not in Korean. But as people became more accustomed to the concept of teletherapy, they felt it was more convenient and less stigmatizing than in-person visits, Yeom said. One survey from KFAM found that some 90% of the clients preferred Zoom over in-person sessions.