Healing the Tigress: An AAPI Maternal Mental Health Podcast

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #9 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com !] As children of immigrants, Peggy and Jasmine both grew up speaking Chinese in their households and attending Chinese School on the weekends. In this episode, we share about our personal experiences learning Chinese and how/why the end results may have differed in our later year...

Happy Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month AND also, Happy Maternal Mental Health Month! May is always a big month because of these two things coincide and are also the basis of our podcast themes. We don’t usually do a season finale episode, but starting at the beginning of 2026, we had to make some shifts to think ahead for the future of Healing the Tigress. And after working it out am...

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #8 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com !] Besides for talking to each other about their perinatal mental health challenges like postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety during the early motherhood years, Peggy and Jasmine have also had many reflective talks over the years about the decision to have just one child o...

This episode dives into the topics of non-traditional paths to parenthood, as well as not settling for a partner if it doesn't feel like the right fit. Our guest today is Jen from @AsiansInBloom. Jen is a second-generation Taiwanese American woman and eldest daughter of immigrant parents, with degrees in Psychology, Speech-Language Pathology, and Human-Centered Design Engineering.  Jen shares...

Today's guest, Lana Marcucio, found us through last year's episode 40 that we did with Not a Tiger Mom Podcast 's hosts (two neurodivergent moms raising their own autistic kids), and she connected with us in hopes of sharing her story too. In honor of April as Autism Awareness Month, we were thrilled to speak with her about her journey. Lana is a 1.5 generation Vietnamese/Chinese Am...

For this year's National Infertility Awareness Week, we wanted to give the spotlight to a beloved friend, fan, and contributor to our podcast. Joining us today from her usual behind-the-scenes role is Emilie Chuong, the gracious Japanese/Chinese American photographer who took our podcast photos and headshots to help us launch Season 2! Emilie walks us through her infertility journey with her...

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 moment...

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 c...

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 te...

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 wh...

This episode delves into the critical topic of maternal mental health research and policy, especially as it pertains to the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Our guest today features Cindy Herrick, a certified peer support specialist and Senior Editorial & Research Manager at the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.  Cindy is a Taiwanese American mom of one who shares her...

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 b...

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 ou...

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.  D...

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 wi...

*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-...

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 postpart...

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. Ser...

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-dea...

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 co...

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...

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 bodyw...

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 A...

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...

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 ch...