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LAURA YUEN: Five men, all born in Somalia, gather around a dinner table. In the South Minneapolis bungalow, they play chess, watch soccer. They swap jokes and cigarettes. They know one another like brothers.

But it wasn't blood that brought them together. It was mental illness. Ismail Osman does most of the talking.

ISMAIL OSMAN: I'm very lucky to be here because it's one of the nicest places I've ever been for the last 10 years.

LAURA YUEN: Osman and his housemates share this Somali cultural group home for men with mental illness. They've struggled with substance abuse, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, and in Osman's case, even homelessness. Osman says he had big dreams when he escaped Somalia's Civil War and arrived in America. He was 17.

ISMAIL OSMAN: When I came here, my goal was to be a movie star.

LAURA YUEN: You can see how a guy like Osman might believe he would be famous one day. At 28, he's a big guy with a large personality to match. And his childhood memories from Somalia are the stuff of Hollywood movies, the violent kind. It's just that processing those memories is still painful.

ISMAIL OSMAN: I don't like to say it, but in self-defense, I kind of did some horrible things that I don't like to talk about it.

LAURA YUEN: Osman says he witnessed the murder of his aunt and uncle. He watched a young girl get brutally raped. He's still haunted by what he saw and by what he did. He doesn't give details, but he says he was only 12, yet, big enough to carry an assault rifle.

ISMAIL OSMAN: My nightmares usually is I get shot on my sleep. Somebody will come and say you remember me, Ismail? You killed me. You took my life. Now I'm here to take yours. And I jump out of bed. I'm sweating, hot. Sometimes, I get up screaming.

LAURA YUEN: Osman says after he came to Minneapolis, he drank to wash away his memories. His housemate Mukhtar Hussein Abdi started drinking about three years ago when he was 21, but he says he just liked to party.

MUKHTAR HUSSEIN ABDI: It was just the love of it. I never had a rough time, you know. I never went through torture, or anything, hunger, or anything, no.

LAURA YUEN: Abdi says he stole cars, got into fights, and drove drunk. He racked up felonies. And his struggle with bipolar disorder made it even more harrowing for his family.

MUKHTAR HUSSEIN ABDI: Pain, my tears fall down. My family hopeless, you know, they see me this guy.

LAURA YUEN: Abdi is wearing a crisp black baseball cap, and a plaid button down shirt. He says he finds wisdom and inspiration from hip hop. But he knows that the swagger he learned from Tupac and Snoop Dogg may not have been the best influence for a young man trying to find his way in a new land. Abdi is reflective when he thinks about the pain he caused his brothers and sisters. He now realizes his behavior was unacceptable.

MUKHTAR HUSSEIN ABDI: I come home drunk. I go start a fight with my brother for no reason. My sisters get involved. They hold me. They hold my brother. You know, and then I smash a chair. And then I smash the microwave. And there is no subject to fight for. It's just the alcohol and what it do.

LAURA YUEN: Everyone at the table can relate to an aching desire to belong. Osman says he felt overwhelmed coming from a Muslim country, where alcohol wasn't tolerated to an American youth culture, where parties and booze were abundant. He recalls his rush to fit in.

Osman says his parents couldn't comprehend the choices he was making. They kicked him out of the house on a cold winter night when he says they should have put him in treatment, instead. Osman, eventually, dropped out of the 11th grade. Now he's going back to school to get his GED. But to this day, he says, his father won't accept him because of his past indiscretions.

MUKHTAR HUSSEIN ABDI: He looked at me and say you are a failure. Here, you are 27, eight, whatever years old you are, and you don't have a degree.

LAURA YUEN: Osman says his father doesn't seem to believe that his mental health struggles are real.

DAVID MCGRAW SCHUCHMAN: For Somalis, as I understand it, they have no concept of mental illness, except as crazy.

LAURA YUEN: Social worker David McGraw Schuchman is warming up with some hot tea in his Minneapolis office.

DAVID MCGRAW SCHUCHMAN: And when they think of crazy, it's like extreme cases like practically throwing off your clothes in public kind of crazy. So you're either crazy, or you're sane.

LAURA YUEN: Schucman's clinic, run by the nonprofit volunteers of America, focuses solely on East Africans. He says, it's important to recognize that every refugee in the Somali American community has been affected in some way by the Civil War. If they weren't shot at, their relatives were.

But he says many aren't getting the help they need. In fact, there are no words in the Somali language to describe the continuum of mental illness. Some Somalis refer to depression as qulub. It's the same word that describes the sadness a female camel feels after she's lost her baby.

Schucman recalls going to an elders meeting to drum up support for his services in the '90s. But he says he went about it the wrong way.

DAVID MCGRAW SCHUCHMAN: Well, I realized that what the people had heard was if you know any crazy people, call David. So they were very polite, of course. But nobody called because nobody wants to admit that they're crazy or anybody else's crazy.

LAURA YUEN: Over the years, Schucman has learned to avoid focusing on diagnoses. Instead, he'll talk about symptoms. He'll ask his clients if they have problems sleeping or if they feel anxious. Sometimes, their mental anguish produces real physical pain.

Social worker Abdulahi Mohamed is driving through South Minneapolis to visit a client. Many of the young Somali-American people he works with are stuck somewhere between the first generation immigrants and second generation Americans. Born in Somalia, they came to the States at a young age and had problems adjusting. So they dropped out of school and either joined gangs or picked up drugs and alcohol.

ABDULAHI MOHAMED: I really feel like the youth are trying their best to fit in. And they're trying to survive the way they know how to.

LAURA YUEN: In the end, Mohamed says, they were rejected by both the American and Somali communities. Mohamed was born in Somalia. And while he feels empathy for some of the Somali American youth, he realizes those feelings aren't shared by everyone.

ABDULAHI MOHAMED: The community doesn't have an understanding of what really these young ones are going through. They are just seen as bad kids. And they made these choices.

LAURA YUEN: He says part of the problem is that when a family resettles in a new country, the roles of parents and children can reverse themselves. Mohamed says Somali parents learned once they arrived in America that they couldn't discipline their children by hitting them.

One of their top parenting tools was now considered child abuse. Meanwhile, their kids picked up English with relative ease. And they became interpreters for their parents.

ABDULAHI MOHAMED: So parents become powerless. Children become powerful.

LAURA YUEN: When Somali Americans talk about a crisis among their children, they're usually referring to their sons. After all, young men are the ones joining gangs and killing shopkeepers. The success stories often belong to Somali girls, who are staying out of trouble and graduating from college.

Professor Cawo Abdi has done a lot of research on the gender question within her community. And she says it's hard to say if Somali women are truly doing better than men in this country. But Abdi, who teaches sociology at the University of Minnesota, says the patriarchal Somali culture has actually helped girls here in the long-run.

CAWO ABDI: There was more scrutiny also, of course, paid to girls because when boys and girls spend a lot of time outside, it's the girl who can come back pregnant, not the boy. So what it meant is that girls are staying close to home. They are doing their homework. They are succeeding in high school. Whereas, some of the boys, are not doing that.

LAURA YUEN: In Somalia, she says, parents saw no harm in shooing their sons out of the house because they knew other adults would be watching out for them. But that approach didn't work once parents moved their children to Minneapolis. The boys were sent outside, where drug dealers and gangs roamed the street corners

ABDULAHI MOHAMED: Abdulahi Mohamed, the social worker, arrives at his clients doorstep in South Minneapolis. But his client is a parent, not a child. Safiya Mohamed is a single mom raising five kids in a sparse Minneapolis duplex. Safiya is in the kitchen frying chicken.

A pot of mac and cheese for her young daughters is bubbling on the stove. Safiya's family embodies some of the biggest challenges for struggling Somali families in Minnesota. She feels like she has no control over her teenage boys. She's depressed, and she worries that she's not capable of nurturing her youngest kids. Safiya says she knows she's not well.

SAFIYA MOHAMED: I'm sick. You come to America. I'm sick. I'm very, very sick.

LAURA YUEN: She describes the pressure in her head. And in her words, she doesn't speak English nice. Safiya used to be a businesswoman in Somalia, running her own grocery. But when the war broke out, her life of comfort quickly slipped away.

She lost her home, her business, her mother, and even her husband. He fled in a separate direction. And she only learned he was alive and in Kenya two years after she heard he was killed. She still talks to her husband on the phone every day.

But she hasn't been able to bring him to the states because of immigration problems. Safiya knows his absence is taking a toll on their children.

SAFIYA MOHAMED: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

LAURA YUEN: Their dad is not here. And that's the problem. Since I've been in this country, I haven't worked. I'm sick. They need a lot of things that I can't give them. They feel neglected.

But it's her three oldest children who give her the most stress. They're all boys.

SAFIYA MOHAMED: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

LAURA YUEN: Right now, I'm worried because they don't have jobs. They can't go to school because they are over school age. They don't do anything here.

And there are bad kids outside, standing in the streets. And I'm worried that they may influence them. If my sons join that group, there's going to be trouble.

Safiya's youngest daughter, 12-year-old Hodan, never met her father. She says, if her dad were around, he could help the family.

HODAN ALI: He can make my brother stop doing bad stuff.

LAURA YUEN: What kind of bad stuff?

HODAN ALI: I don't really know because I don't get inside their business.

LAURA YUEN: Hodan says it's not easy seeing her mom when she's sick like she was just a few days ago.

HODAN ALI: And she was on the bed sleeping most of the time.

LAURA YUEN: The family receives about $1,100 a month in public assistance. But Safiya, with no job or car, doesn't feel like she's becoming self-sufficient. Her reality is nothing like what she envisioned for her family when she moved them to America.

She's told her daughters of the odyssey that brought them to Minnesota, of how they escaped the fighting in Somalia by illegally crossing into other African countries, of how she was attacked in a Botswana jail and lost her two front teeth. Safiya tells these stories to her children in Somali and broken English.

They respond in English and broken Somali. And the result is a generation gap as old as the immigrant story.

SAFIYA MOHAMED: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

LAURA YUEN: When they came here, they adopted the American way of life so easily. But it's still difficult for me. Safiya Mohamed says her children have been able to forget Somalia. But she says it's impossible for her to forget. Laura Yuen, Minnesota Public Radio news, Minneapolis.