Featured Psychologist
Evelyn Yee-Wai Miu Lee Fong, EdD, was born on June 25, 1944, in Macau, China. She received her BA in Social Work at Chung Chi College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963. She then went on to graduate from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland with an MSSA in Social Work in 1968. Lee worked at Boston's South Cove Community Health Center from 1976 to 1980 as the director of Mental Health, Social Services and Health Education before moving forward and receiving her doctorate in Mental Health Administration at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in 1983. Between 1980 and 1982, she served as a social science analyst in the federal government in Washington, D.C. In 1982, she joined the Asian Focus Psychiatric Inpatient Unit at San Francisco General Hospital as program director, as well as being appointed assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). In 1988, she founded the first-ever Chinese Family Alliance of Mentally Ill, and in 1992, she helped to organize the NICOS Chinese Health Coalitionopens in new window, both in San Francisco.
In 1999, Lee became clinical professor of Psychiatry at UCSF. Lee served as a consultant on cultural competence and diversity to many community health and mental health organizations, schools, hospitals and local, state and federal government agencies such as the National Technical Assistance Center for Children's Mental Health, Georgetown University; State of California, Department of Mental Health; and State of Texas, Department of Mental Health.
Among her 30 plus publications, she has written and taught in topics such as: cross-cultural communication (including the use of interpreters); refugee trauma; immigrant acculturation; inter-generational conflict resolution; the role of religion; and complementary/alternative/integrative medicine approaches. In 1988, she authored the widely used parenting teens handbook, "Ten Principles for Raising Chinese American Teens," which was subsequently translated and adapted into Chinese and Vietnamese. She was widely respected and loved in the mental health field and the Asian-American community – as a clinician, administrator, teacher, author, community advocate and humanitarian.