For several days and nights, the small fishing boat Michael Quach and his family used to escape Vietnam in 1980 violently pitched and rolled on waves sometimes as high as 40 feet. The dark vastness of the South China Sea terrified Quach, who 10 years old at the time.
“Every day I felt, we all felt like we were gonna die,” Quach said. “But my dad kept saying, ‘We’re gonna be OK. We’re going to be OK…we’re going to get to land, we’re going to get to land soon. And every day he kept that promise, that we’re going to make it.”
On the sixth day, the boat carrying the family of eight and 31 others landed on the shore of Indonesia. “See, I told you,” his father said. “We made it.”
Now 56, Dr. Quach, a Stanford-trained psychiatrist, is a year into his tenure as Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health Division medical director — a role that has him drawing on his family’s experience fleeing post-war Vietnam, part of the roughly 2 million-person exodus from the country in the decades after the U.S. pullout.
At the time, he was too young and frightened to understand the concept of optimism, Quach said. But his father’s belief was foundational for the family and remains so to this day.
“When people ask me how do you do it, I tell them my optimism muscle is very strong,” he said.
Sonoma County’s behavioral health medical director, Dr. Michael Quach spoke about the “power of optimism” at 2nd Annual Connection is Prevention conference for seniors, Thursday Sept. 3, 2026 at the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
Michael Quach, seen here as child in Vietnam. (Courtesy photo)
Michael Quach, seen here as child in Vietnam with his sister, Phuong Quach. (Courtesy photo)
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Sonoma County’s behavioral health medical director, Dr. Michael Quach spoke about the “power of optimism” at 2nd Annual Connection is Prevention conference for seniors, Thursday Sept. 3, 2026 at the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
On Thursday, Quach shared his story and that message of optimism with local residents during a half-day conference on senior wellness and mental health hosted by the county at the Finley Community Center in west Santa Rosa.
The conference, titled Connection is Prevention, brought together older adults, caregivers, family members, and community providers to highlight the crucial role of human connection, with the goal of promoting mental health and preventing suicide.
A student’s journey
In that boat with Quach, on that perilous crossing from near Ho Chi Minh City 46 years ago, were his parents, brother and four sisters. They landed on Galang Island, just south of Singapore, and were admitted into refugee camp.
Quach said his family fled Vietnam for a better life in America. Life in Vietnam had become difficult due to political oppression under the communist regime following the 1975 fall of Saigon. His family spent a year at the Galang refugee camp before being sent to Singapore for a week and then ultimately arriving in the Bay Area.
“We settled in San Jose because my paternal aunt, who had arrived in the United States ahead of us, sponsored our family, which allowed us to happily reunite with her here in America,” Quach said.
In San Jose, Quach struggled with English and learning a new culture — “how to fit in” in an altogether new place. He was bullied, he said, by schoolmates at Rosemary Elementary and Samuel Rogers Middle School. He graduated from Blackford High School in San Jose and made his way to UC Davis, where he earned a degree in biochemistry. His medical degree came from Stanford University in 2001.
“I fought my way through research, I fought my way through medical school at Stanford, I fought my way through residency at Stanford,” he said. “said. “I fought my way through leadership positions.”
Dr. Michael Quach, medical director of Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health division, seen here with his mother Kheo Diep after graduating from Rogers Middle School in San Jose. (Courtesy photo)
Dr. Michael Quach, medical director of Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health division, seen here with his parents, mother Kheo Diep and father Thuan Quach, after graduating from Stanford University School of Medicine. (Courtesy photo)
Dr. Michael Quach, medical director of Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health division, shown earlier in his medical career. (Courtesy photo)
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Dr. Michael Quach, medical director of Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health division, seen here with his mother Kheo Diep after graduating from Rogers Middle School in San Jose. (Courtesy photo)
At Stanford, he served as chief resident in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and in 2006 received the prestigious Stanford George Gulevich Humanistic Medicine Award. Today, he leads the Vietnamese Physician Association of Northern California. He is also president of the Viet-American Mental Health Network.
Quach said exercising the “optimism muscle” has helped him over the years, ever since his family fled Vietnam.
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence,” he said in his speech Thursday, reciting the famous Helen Keller quote.
It is too easy to dismiss optimism as a “platitude, a bumper-sticker philosophy,” one often confused for wishful thinking or a personality trait.
“Optimism is not just a trait or mood or emotion, it is also a choice,” he said. “We have a choice to be optimistic…My dad taught me that optimism is a discipline, shaped in the darkest waters of our lives.”
In his talk, his first public speech as the county’s mental health medical chief, Quach recounted his family’s hardships after leaving Vietnam.
“When we arrived here to America, we traded physical storms of the ocean for the quiet, grinding storms of displacement,” he said. “We had to learn a new language from scratch. We lived in poverty. We stood out in every room we entered.”
Growing up in San Jose, a city that today is shaped heavily by the Vietnamese diaspora but which was then rife with discrimination, “cruelty was immediate,” he said. Fellow students hurled trash at him in the campus yard and lobbed insults, calling him “FOB” — fresh off the boat. They mocked his broken English, his school clothes. He’d come home scratched, bruised, exhausted and he remembered pleading with his father to let him stay home.
“My father listened quietly and looked at me and said, ‘You have to go. You have to learn. You have to excel. You must work until you are better than all of them,” Quach said. “My father refused to let adversity become my identity…He taught me that dignity isn’t granted by others. It’s earned through endurance.”
Medical science of optimism
It wasn’t until years later, as medical student, he recalled, that he began to understand the “scientific architecture” of that determined outlook on life, the extension of hopeful words his father repeated over and over on the unsteady boat crossing the South China Sea.
Although optimism is often framed in esoteric, metaphysical and spiritual terms, there is concrete medical science behind it. Quach, who did his psychiatric residency at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, explained that our brains can be rewired to become more optimistic.
“People think optimism is a mood or a feeling, and it’s not just that, it’s also a choice that we make,” he said. Everyone faces challenges or barriers. Those who do so without sufficient hope — with the burden of pessimism — can suffer the buildup of the body’s main stress hormone, cortisol.
That causes the amygdala, the fear center in the brain, to enlarge and, consequently, the prefrontal cortex gets smaller, Quach said.
“That means your executive functioning is less effective, so you’re not able to think clearly. You’re not able to be rational when you’re stressed out,” he said. “Optimism, changes everything — your brain changes back, the amygdala gets smaller.”
Quach said the human brain has evolved over millions of years to adapt to danger and the need to survive. Our primitive ancestors, he said, worried about “falling down a cliff or watching out for a tiger.” Sudden and efficient cortisol hormone production served us well across millennia, giving us the energy boost needed for life-or-death circumstances.
But today, he said, our brains need retraining to keep stress levels in check.
“Evolutionarily speaking, our brain was prepared for survival and not really for happiness,” he said. “We were not trained to be happy. We were trained to survive. But in modern days, we don’t have those same dangers and our brain still functions the same way as when we’re stressed out.”
Dark feelings about one’s life, job and relationships cause stress levels not unlike those experienced millennia ago by our forebears at the brink of a cliff or facing down a tiger, he said.
Quach cites the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, an American psychologist considered the founder of positive psychology, which examines the science of happiness and how a “normal life” can and should be improved. Seligman posits that modern psychology, dominated by the “disease model” for more than 60 years, has greatly improved the lives of many who in previous generations suffered in silence.
In a TED Talk, Seligman credited that disease model with robust scientific study of behavioral health issues such as depression and alcoholism, along with advancements in prescription drugs and psychological treatments. The downside of the disease model is that traditional psychology has overlooked “relatively untroubled people,” he said, and how they could become happier, more fulfilled and more productive.
“In our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier — positive interventions,” Seligman said in his 2004 year address.
A healthy (larger) prefrontal cortex, said Quach, produces more dopamine and serotonin, which help you stay calm and rational and make better decisions. He cited a 2019 study that found a correlation between optimism and better heart health. The report, a meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 229,291 people, found that optimism was associated with lower risk of cardiovascular events and pessimism was associated with higher risk of such events. Cortisol damages blood vessels, he said.
“When you are optimistic, you’re cortisol is lower. You’re protecting your arteries from getting diseased,” he said. Incorporating exercise, a healthy diet and major life changes such as quitting smoking likely produces even better results, he said.
Landing in Sonoma County
Before coming to Sonoma County, Quach held a number of leadership roles at nonprofit organizations, professional associations and behavioral health agencies.
Those roles included medical director of Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County; executive behavioral health medical director for Santa Clara County Health System; and medical director and chief psychiatrist of the nonprofit Family and Children Services.
Faviola Ponce, a licensed clinical social worker who works for Santa Clara County, worked with Quach from 2007 to 2014 at Family and Children Services. She called Quach “a very special psychiatrist” who always saw the human side of the people he worked with, whether clients or colleagues.
The organization often worked with people in the criminal justice system who had dual diagnoses of substance use and mental health disorders, as well as those experiencing homelessness, Ponce said.
“He not only took the time to listen to his patients, but served in a way that way that was very caring and empathetic,” she said. “As a colleague, he was always very supportive. He would hear us out and was always trying to meet the needs of the community we served.
After being recruited for the position of Sonoma County behavioral health medical director, Quach officially assumed the post last September. The position was previously held by Dr. Daniel Bleman, from August 2020 to February 2023.
It was “my good karma,” said Jan Cobaleda-Kegler, director of the Sonoma County Behavioral Health Division, that the county was able to find and hire Quach.
Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health medical director, Dr. Michael Quach. Photo taken Thursday Sept. 3, 2026 at the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
Sonoma County’s behavioral health medical director, Dr. Michael Quach spoke about the “power of optimism” at 2nd Annual Connection is Prevention conference for seniors, Thursday Sept. 3, 2026 at the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
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Sonoma County’s Behavioral Health medical director, Dr. Michael Quach. Photo taken Thursday Sept. 3, 2026 at the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
“We love working with him,” Cobaleda-Kegler said. “Of course, he’s really smart. He’s compassionate, he’s just got a big heart and he’s fun. We have a good time with him.”
As medical director of the division, Quach supervises about 20 full-time and part-time adult and child psychiatrists. He also maintains the county’s behavioral health medical policies, which he recently updated during his first year on the job, Cobaleda-Kegler said. Quach is also part of the division’s management team, working closely with section managers on high-level policies and initiatives, she said.
At the conference, Quach urged the room full of seniors, their family members and local advocates to challenge their negative thoughts as a way of exercising their optimism muscle, making it bigger and stronger, with the aim of becoming more resilient.
“We navigate an ocean we did not choose,” he said. “Remember, optimism doesn’t require you to pretend the storm isn’t raging. It simply demands that you believe with stubborn and absolute resolve that land exists beyond the mist.”
Staff Writer Martin Espinoza can be reached at martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.