AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Black intergenerational trauma3/31/2024 ![]() ![]() The prolonged separation Blacks have had with medical knowledge and proper health care facilities have enabled their aversion to physicians. He later fell into the same pattern of drug abuse that his grandmother struggled with when raising his own son. He believed that “she did not want to drink, but that was her way of coping.” Since “mental health for the blacks… was …taboo,” (Sessions 0:07:57.1) Sessions was unable to piece together feelings of loneliness and dejection as his own battle with depression. William Sessions, a DC native but current North Carolina resident, recounts stories of his maternal grandmother’s alcoholism and depression. This deleterious mentality has been passed down to subsequent generations, creating the present-day inability to recognize depression and in turn the inevitability to succumb to it (Coleman, 2016). The repression they used to protect themselves in one season, ended up harming them in the next as their inability to recognize emotions enabled slaves to refute mental illness. Parents grappled with simultaneously nurturing their children and teaching them how to suppress their emotions in a dangerous environment (PBS). The psychological toll that being treated like property had on Black people was immense. Slave literacy was not a priority for many plantation owners, leaving Blacks in a state of ignorance. The life of a slave consisted of either fieldwork, errands, housework, or being subjected to medical research as a superbody (a term used to describe Black women’s role in advancing the medical field) (Zellars, 2018). The denial of mental illness across the Black community stems from transgenerational sentiments built upon a lack of medical knowledge and psychic numbing. The high prevalence of depression among Black slaves normalized, desensitized, and trivialized the condition (AJ+, 2019). ![]() Two interviewees who took part in the Stories to Save Lives Project, William Sessions and Lyman Henderson, recount lived experiences that are reflective of the chasm between Blacks and the American healthcare system. Factors such as their lack of medical knowledge, Antebellum living conditions, and being subject to medical experimentation contribute to their negative biases. ![]() The culmination of lived experiences and transgenerational trauma contributes to Black people’s iatrophobia: aversion towards physicians. This intergenerational trauma has manifested itself into increased anxiety, depression, cortisol levels, and hyper-awareness among Blacks (Halloran, 2019). This phenomenon results from a chemical change (increased DNA methylation) in the trauma survivor’s stress response genes. Humans are creatures of habit, meaning that an individual will inherit their caregiver’s parenting styles along with their epigenetic trauma. The psychological effects that slavery and racism have had on the Black population, also referred to as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), has forever impacted their perception of the word ‘safety’ in America. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |