Stress & Trauma Toolkit

Racism, racial bias, and discrimination: These may contribute to poor physical and mental health among racial and ethnic minority populations.

Racial profiling: African-American males are disproportionately assumed to be criminals and are frequently stopped and searched based on the perceived notion of wrongdoing. Many individuals who have been profiled have developed symptoms of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Institutional racism and social determinants of mental health: Institutional racism is a critical social determinant of health. Other social determinants include quality education, safe housing, gainful employment, appropriate health care, and a clean environment. All can lead to adverse health outcomes.

• Low socioeconomic status (SES): African Americans tend to have lower socioeconomic status than non-Hispanic Whites and Asian Americans, as determined by education, income, and occupation. Low SES has been significantly associated with a higher risk for mental illness. Even when adjusted by education level, the unemployment rate for African Americans is significantly higher than for their Caucasian counterparts. When employed, African-American workers are more likely to be in the lowest-paying economic sector.
• Housing segregation: Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made housing discrimination illegal, housing segregation continues. This inadvertently affects access to quality education since constrained housing choices can impact health, education, and other life outcomes.
• Mass incarceration: African Americans are disproportionately represented at every level of the justice system. They are more likely to be arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to harsher terms than their white counterparts. Mass incarceration not only affects the individual who is imprisoned but also the family members who are left behind.

Trauma: Untreated traumatic stress has serious consequences for children, adults, and families.

• Individual: African Americans disproportionately experience negative life events, including poverty, victimization, abuse, and trauma.
• Complex trauma: African Americans often have complex trauma histories in their families, with multiple generations affected by adversity of an invasive, interpersonal nature such as poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse, witnessing domestic and community violence, separation from family members and re-victimization by others, mental health issues, substance use, and negative contact with government agencies. Complex traumas usually begin in early childhood and can disrupt many aspects of development and the formation of one’s sense of self.
• Collective Trauma: Refers to a trauma that happens to large groups of individuals and can be transmitted trans-generationally and across communities. War, genocide, slavery, terrorism, and natural disasters can cause collective trauma, which can be further defined as historical, ancestral, or cultural.
• Historical Trauma: African Americans share public narratives of complex and collective traumas due to a long history of prejudice and unfavorable societal treatment of African Americans in the United States. These public narratives--which can be referred to as historical traumas--involve both shared historical experiences across generations such as lynching and slavery and present-day experiences such as police brutality and mass incarceration. These past and present-day experiences serve as reminders of the consistent dehumanization and devaluation of African Americans.
• Cultural Trauma: Cultural trauma is often described as a collective traumatic event (e.g., slavery) that leaves permanent and enduring memories in the consciousness of an identified group. This may have long-lasting adverse effects on their future identity.

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