Back in the 1980s, Howard University psychology professor Jules Harrell took racism to the lab to see how witnessing acts of racism affects blood pressure and cardiovascular events. He found that Black people may even carry the stress of racism in their sleep, NBC reports.
That research focused on the “meanness and inconvenience” of racism—but it couldn’t compare to the blatant brutality soon to be revealed in the beating of Rodney King—and now the homicide of George Floyd.
The rise of social media means that high-profile killings of Black people replay on a loop, disseminating waves of secondary trauma.
Psychologist Gail Parker’s advice: don’t watch. “It’s about self-protection. Secondary trauma is just as lethal to Black people as secondhand smoke.”
Proper mental health care is also key. But frequent misdiagnosis by non-Black doctors and a dearth of Black mental health professionals are yet another health disparity that needs addressing, NPR reports.
Black Americans experience deadly stress as a pandemic and violent racism collide, experts say
▻https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-americans-experience-deadly-stress-pandemic-violent-racism-collide-ex
Burke Harris, the mother of twin sons age 17 and sons 8 and 4, told NBC News that her entire medical training and career have been devoted to reducing health disparity.
“The way chronic stress and trauma gets under our skin and affects our biology was not being addressed. That’s why it felt important to me not only to elevate the issue, but also to elevate the science,” she said. “The science has been around for decades.”
Research has long shown a disparity between the health of Blacks and whites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there is an overrepresentation of Blacks hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Overall in the U.S., Black people are more likely to die at early ages from all causes of illnesses.
Local governments, including those of Charlotte, North Carolina; Denver; Indianapolis; and Dallas, have recently declared racism a public health crisis. Now advocates wait to see what solutions they will implement.
Burke Harris said: “We have to help health care providers understand how trauma affects people’s health. It is just like lead poisoning. Doctors can do medical treatment to help reduce the impact of lead on someone’s health. But the real answer is to get lead out of the paint.”
Black Americans Face Higher Barriers To Getting Good Mental Health Support : Shots - Health News : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/25/877549715/bear-our-pain-the-plea-for-more-black-mental-health-workers
Two decades of life experience made a mental-health activist of Kai Koerber. When he was 16 and a student at a Parkland, Fla., high school, a gunman killed 17 people, including one his friends.
“I really did suffer a domestic terrorist attack, and that’s not something that happens to you every day,” Koerber says.
But as a young Black man growing up in the South, Koerber had already faced threats of racial and police violence routinely, and those experiences, too, shaped his relationship with the world. He’s coped with that stress, he says, through a lifelong practice of meditation. And after the school massacre, Koerber also sought emotional support from a therapist with a deep empathy for his personal traumas.
“Finding a Black therapist really saved me some time, and there was more connection, in terms of the kinds of struggles that I might feel or the the kinds of ways I might think about certain scenarios,” Koerber says.
Now a rising sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, Koerber says having access to good mental health care is critical to both preventing and dealing with the after-effects of violence.
