Is People-Pleasing Making South Asian Women Sick?

When Aisha Malik was 15, her dad’s relatives came to visit them in Windsor, Ontario. There was just one problem. Due to a lack of space, Malik’s mom told the relatives they needed to store their belongings with another family member. Soon, there was yelling. “Everybody else was angry,” Malik told The Juggernaut. “I didn’t want to be adding fuel to the fire.” So she swallowed her feelings. 

A few weeks later, Malik started noticing something strange. “I had red patches on my skin everywhere, an insane amount of dry skin in my hair, and then...[I was] just tired,” she recalled. Years later, Malik was diagnosed with psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that rapidly speeds up skin growth, leading to painful, itchy, and dry patches. Just a few years after that, doctors diagnosed her with hypothyroidism, a disease that interrupts the body’s ability to control its metabolism. 

In May 2026, artist Alida Sun went viral for posting a simple message on Instagram: “You need to be a b*** or else you will develop an autoimmune disease.” But for South Asian women — often taught to placate, nurture, and keep the peace no matter the cost — that meme might just be an unsettling truth. Is people-pleasing literally making us sick?