Overlooking Racism May Lead to Undiagnosed Mental Health Disorders

Mental health professionals may be missing at least five novel mental health problems because the impact of racism is not considered when determining mental health, a new report suggests. 

Tony N. Brown, Vanderbilt University assistant professor of sociology, asserts in the report that standard mental health criteria may fail to capture a true picture of problems across racial groups. 

That failure in turn, leads to some psychological problems going unclassified and undiagnosed. "We don't know what is deviant if we don't know what the norm is and the norm is dictated by society's beliefs, which vary across racial groups.

For example, the black community may question the sanity of blacks who bleach their skin or blacks who 'hate being black,' but these lay definitions of poor mental health are ignored by mental health professionals," Brown said. 

"Combining lay and clinical definitions and considering racism's impact on mental health could offer a more complete picture of mental health disorders," Brown added. 

The report, "Critical Race Theory Speaks to the Sociology of Mental Health: Mental Health Problems Produced by Racial Stratification," appears in the September edition of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior published by the American Sociological Association. 

Mental health research has hinted that a complex relationship between racism and mental health exists but the link has not yet been fully explored. The conventional wisdom in the field of mental health is that the more stress a person is exposed to, the more likely it is that he or she will suffer from poor mental health. 

However, community epidemiological studies conducted during the past 20 years indicate that blacks, relative to whites, exhibit about the same, or in some cases lower rates of psychiatric disorder despite blacks' stress levels being compounded by racism.

Brown believes racism's not being factored into the mental health equation accounts for some of the disparity. In the report, Brown proposes five mental health problems related to racism that he believes are the most prevalent and impairing. He focuses on these five because available evidence offers strongest support that these problems exist. They are: 

*Nihilistic Tendencies - self-defeating attempts to survive in a society that systematically frustrates normal efforts for natural human growth. According to the report, this mental health problem is likely to affect blacks that, finding the doors to legitimate survival blocked, have chosen destructive means to achieve immediate needs and desires out of an urgency to survive. 

*Anti-self issues - a mental health problem that describes how blacks feel estranged from their racial selves and seek to escape their blackness and any connection to other blacks. Estranged blacks have internalized negative notions about being black that result in disdain for their racial group and their trying to create social and physical space between themselves and their group. 

*Suppressed Anger Expression - denial of anger and aggression that leads to false affability, passivity, resignation and ultimately withdrawal or inward self-destruction. In social or workplace settings, blacks may feel they are denied the liberty of expressing anger about racial issues which can build up over time to detrimental effects. 

*Delusional Denial Tendencies - a mental health problem that can affect both blacks and whites. In response to racism, blacks may repress unpleasant or painful ideas from reaching the conscious level and ultimately generating disability. Researchers have also theorized that whites are socialized to believe that they do not benefit from racial oppression and that they do not need to consider the role race plays in their lives. 

*Extreme Racial Paranoia - a mental health problem typically affecting whites who hold illusions of exaggerated self-importance based on race and who experience unreasonable discomfort at the thought of having an interpersonal interaction with a black person. Brown cites research that has called extreme racial paranoia (Nerophobia) among whites a serious mental illness. 

Brown suggests that more research is needed to verify these mental health problems and to explore the relationship between racism and mental health across all racial groups. He also cautions against the acceptance of standardized concepts of mental health because the dominant group in society often defines normalcy and disease. 

He cites the example of white psychiatrists in the 19th century who claimed black slaves suffered from "drapetomania" a "psychiatric disorder indicated by a desire to run away from slavery."

Psychological Responses to Racism Similar to Trauma Symptoms Study Finds

November 16, 2012

For Black American adults, perceived racism may cause mental health symptoms similar to trauma and could lead to some physical health disparities between Blacks and other populations in the United States, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.

 

While previous studies have found links between racism and mental health, this is the first meta-analysis on the subject focusing exclusively on black American adults, according to the study published online in APA’s Journal of Counseling Psychology^®.

“We focused on black American adults because this is a population that has reported, on average, more incidents of racism than other racial minority groups and because of the potential links between racism and not only mental health, but physical health as well,” said lead author Alex Pieterse, PhD, of the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Researchers examined 66 studies comprising 18,140 black adults in the United States. To be included in the analysis, a study must have been published in a peer-reviewed journal or dissertation between 1996 and 2011; include a specific analysis of mental health indicators associated with racism; and focus specifically on black American adults in the United States.

Black Americans’ psychological responses to racism are very similar to common responses to trauma, such as somatization which is psychological distress expressed as physical pain; interpersonal sensitivity; and anxiety, according to the study.

Individuals who said they experienced more and very stressful racism were more likely to report mental distress, the authors said. While the researchers did not collect data on the impacts on physical health, they cite other studies to point out that perceived racism may also affect black Americans’ physical health.

“The relationship between perceived racism and self-reported depression and anxiety is quite robust, providing a reminder that experiences of racism may play an important role in the health disparities phenomenon,” Pieterse said. “For example, African-Americans have higher rates of hypertension, a serious condition that has been associated with stress and depression.”

The authors recommended that therapists assess racism experiences as part of standard procedure when treating black Americans, and that future studies focus on how discrimination is perceived in specific settings, such as work, online or in school.

Article: “Perceived Racism and Mental Health Among Black American Adults: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Alex L. Pieterse, PhD, University at Albany, State University of New York; Nathan R. Todd, PhD, DePaul University; Helen A. Neville, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Robert T. Carter, PhD, Teachers College, Columbia University; Journal of Counseling Psychology, Vol. 59, No. 1.

History of Black Adjustment Disorder

by Kenny Anderson

From the Portuguese slave forts established on the Gold Coast of Africa, Ghana in 1482, to the poverty-stricken hyper-segregated communities that many Blacks in America still live in today has been an Adjustment Disorder.

Adjustment disorder (AD) is a psychological response to an identifiable stressor or group of stressors that cause(s) significant emotional or behavioral symptoms, A stressor is generally an event of a serious, unusual nature that an individual or group of individuals experience.

The stressors that cause adjustment disorders may be grossly traumatic; the more chronic or recurrent the stressor, the more likely it is to produce a disorder. The ongoing adjustment disorder Blacks have experienced is the constant stressor of racial oppression that’s rooted in our acute stress reaction to slavery.

Indeed, Blacks’ historical experience of racial oppression has caused psychopathologies. Captured by Portuguese and other European slave traders, Africans had to go from Adjustment Disorders in slave forts to Adjustment Disorders on slave ships, where they were stacked like sardines in the unventilated hulls.

Professor S.E. Anderson described the conditions on the bottom of these ‘death ships’: “The screams, moans, crying, coughing, wretching, wailing, prayer cries, are all around you, in you. The pains, open sores, pus, mucous, blood, human waste, foaming drool, the chain cuts – gashes, flies, parasitic bugs, rats, filth, the hot smothering stinking air are all around you, in you. In fact, you have merged your being with the total ‘African Agony’ on board a vessel moving away from the Motherland”.

Arriving in American ports, after surviving the dreaded ‘Middle Passage’ voyage, Black slaves had Adjustment Disorders of being in a strange land, horrorified, traumatized, humiliated, sold on auction blocks, enslaved, separated from family, relatives, and countrymen; branded, whipped, stripped of name and cultural identity; held in slave bondage for 246 years (1619 – 1865).

Though slavery ended, the Reconstruction Era beginning in 1865 was a period of Black ‘Re-enslavement’, where Blacks with no resources to be free after being so-called emancipated, were forced back on the plantation in debt peonage as sharecroppers.

With no slavery Reparations (40 Acres & Mule) to be independent and no money Blacks had to finance their re-enslavement by borrowing money for supplies, food, and rent from the plantation owners (former slave masters). Being indebted neo-slaves, Blacks were super-exploited to remain constantly behind in their debts; they could not stop sharecropping until they paid off their debt.

Black re-enslavement was made possible by legislation passed by Southern states after the American Civil War known as ‘Black Codes’, laws designed to control the labor, movements, and activities of Blacks. Southern legislators believed Blacks were predestined to work as agricultural laborers and domestics. The Black Codes regulations left Blacks with little freedom and guaranteed a new slave workforce!!

In order to guarantee the enforcement of the Black Codes, the terrorist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization was founded by veterans of the Confederate Army and supported by Southern government officials. The KKK’s purpose was to restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the Civil War by terrorizing, lynching, and murdering Blacks, particularly Black men.

Psychologically, after the jubilation of emancipation and then re-enslaved and terrorized, Blacks suffered from an Adjustment Disorder with a specific depressed mood known as the ‘Blues’.

During the Reconstruction period Blacks became ‘dismally low in spirits’; fell into a ‘deep funk’ of powerlessness, worthlessness, over-burdenedness, madness, downheartedness, heavy-heartedness, broken-heartedness, mournfulness, and sadness.

In his book, ‘The Spirituals & The Blues’, Theology Professor James H. Cone stated: “Slavery is the historical background out of which the Blues were created. Suffering and its relation to Blackness is inseparable from the meaning of the Blues. Without pain and suffering, and what that meant for Black people in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, there would have been no Blues.

The Blue mood means sorrow, frustration, despair, and Black people’s attempt to take these existential realities upon themselves and not lose their sanity. The Blues are not art for art’s sake, music for music’s sake. They are a way of life, a lifestyle of the Black community; and they came into being to give expression to Black identity and the will for survival.”

Escaping from sharecropping and Klan terror, Blacks from the South migrated to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. They brought the Adjustment Disorder Blues with them and had Adjustment Disorders adjusting to a new but familiar Northern cities Blues of racism, segregation, lack of jobs, and poor ghetto neighborhoods.

Malcolm X had remarked that ‘Blacks merely went from down south to up south’. Being in a new, unfamiliar overcrowded urban environment, Blacks felt alienated and longed for family and friends down home. Being lonely and in despair many fell into drinking whiskey and using drugs to escape the stress filled depressive realities of the urban Blues.

Professor Cone’s above mentioned point that the Blues has been a way of life for Blacks in America was captured in the ‘Last Poets’ poem entitled ~ ‘True Blues’:

True blues ain’t no new news
‘bout who’s been abused
for the blues is as old as my stolen soul
I sang the Blues when the missionaries came
passing out Bibles in Jesus’ name
I sang the Blues in the hull of the ship
beneath the sting of the slavemaster’s whip
I sang the Blues when the ship anchored the dock
my family being sold on a slave block
I sang the Blues being torn from my first-born
and hung my head and cried
when my wife took his life and then committed suicide
I sang the Blues on the slavemaster’s plantation
helping him build his ‘free’ nation
I sang the Blues in the cotton field
hustlin’ to make the daily yield
I sang the Blues when he forced my woman to bed
Lord knows! I wished he was dead
I sang the Blues on the run
duckin’ the dog and dodging the gun
I sang the Blues hangin’ from the tree
in a desperate attempt to break free
I sang the Blues from sunup to down
cursing the master when he wasn’t around
I sang the Blues in all his wars
dying for some unknown cause
I sang the Blues in a high tone, low moan
loud groan, soft grunt, hard funk!
I sang the Blues on land, sea and air
about who, when, why and where
I sang the Blues in church on Sunday
Slavin’ on Monday
Misused on Tuesday
Abused on Wednesday
Accused on Thursday
Fried alive on Friday
And died on Saturday
Sho’nuff singin’ the blues
I sang the Blues in the summer, fall, winter and spring
I know sho’nuff that the blues is my thing
I sang the backwater blues
Rhythm and blues
Gospel blues
St Louis blues
Crosstown blues
Chicago blues
Mississippi Goddam blues
The Watts blues
Harlem blues
Hough blues
Gutbucket blues
Funky Junkie blues
I sang the Up North Cigarette Cough blues
The Down South Strung Out On The Side Of My Mouth blues
I sang the blues black
I sang the blues blacker
I sang the blues blackest
I sang about my sho’nuff blue blackness

The ‘Blues’ is deeper than a DSM IV definition of depression. The true Black Blues is existential, it is ‘Blues to the Bone’; it is a spiritual ailment from the unrelenting, grinding stress and strain of daily racial oppression from the cradle to the grave; where one is hurt to the core; one’s essence is wounded and in pain; one’s inner vitality is gone - tapped out; the soul has been depleted; one lives but is ‘dead inside’ (zombie), living a suicidal lifestyle wanting to die, expressed graphically by many young Black men today, “I don’t give a fuck, I’m just fucked up, take me out – kill me!”

The historical experience of Adjustment Disorder by Blacks in America has been defined by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary as ‘Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome’ (PTSS). DeGruy-Leary states that Blacks have never healed from slavery – the ‘Black Holocaust’. The original enslaved Africans were never treated for their severe trauma. After slavery ended nothing was done to help Black ex-slaves recover from trauma; nor was anything done to treat Blacks re-enslaved by Black Codes during Reconstruction.

For one hundred years (1865 – 1965) of Civil Rights struggle, no measure was put in place to provide mental health services to Blacks who had suffered from Klan terror, lynchings, racist murders, repressive Jim Crow laws, and diabolical Tuskegee Syphilis experiments. Even in the post-Civil Rights era, most Blacks today who suffer from on-going racism, massive poverty and unemployment, homelessness, violence, drugs, and psychological duress don’t receive mental health services.

DeGruy-Leary says that there has never been a period of time when Blacks in America were given the information and opportunity to heal from our racial oppression-based Adjustment Disorder injuries. So the psychopathologies have continued, passed down from generation to generation ~ without Blacks being conscious of its origin, symptoms, and treatments.

Diabetes an Epidemic in Black America

by Kevin Chappell

Nearly 21 million people in the United States, or 7 percent of the population, have diabetes. And another 54 million people are believed to have the beginning stages of diabetes.

Every minute of every day, another American develops type 2 diabetes. Among African-Americans, the numbers are even more daunting. One in 7 Blacks has the disease, and African-Americans are twice as likely as Whites to develop diabetes.

At the rate that diabetes is progressing, it is predicted that for every two African-American children born today, one will develop diabetes--type 2 diabetes, which used to be called "adult onset diabetes."

But with more Black children than ever before being diagnosed with diabetes, medical professionals are rethinking their entire approach to the disease--and raising the question: Has diabetes become an epidemic in Black America?

"We're seeing shortening of life spans, people are dying earlier from heart disease, strokes," says Dr. Duane Smoot, chair of the medical department at the Howard University Hospital.

"There are just so many problems associated with diabetes. It causes aging of your blood vessels, so hardening of the arteries occurs more frequently. It causes people to have more problems with aging. We talk about aging gracefully, but with this disease, it makes it more difficult to have a good quality of life.

We have very firm data that tells us that diabetes itself had reached epidemic proportions in this nation as a whole, but more specifically in the African-American community."

Dr. Wayman Wendell Cheatham, medical director at the Medstar Research Institute in Washington, D.C., agrees. "We should be very, very concerned. I am terribly concerned," Cheatham says.

"Diabetes is a major killer. It doesn't only cause people to lose their vision, lose their kidneys, lose their limbs, diabetes reduces life expectancy significantly. People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes. It is one of the more underlisted causes of death of all causes ... With the trend line that we're on, it's a terrible epidemic."

Dr. James Gavin, past president of the American Diabetes Association, defines an epidemic as a disease that spreads "beyond a local population, lasting a long time and reaching people in a wider geographical area," he says. "Many classify diseases as a pandemic once the disease reaches worldwide proportions."

So what caused this explosion of diabetes in the Black community?

Gavin and others believe that genetics have played a large role. However, given that the population gene pool shifts very slowly overtime, the current epidemic of diabetes can't solely be attributed to genes.

Many health professionals are attributing a large part of the problem to the drastic slowing of active lifestyles, and the drastic shift in diet to one that now consists largely of processed foods.

The result: Black children and adults, particularly females, are more overweight now than ever before. One study on physical activity found that, by the age of 18, Black girls have a decline in physical activity twice that of White girls the same age.

"Obesity and diabetes go hand in hand," says Dr. Joyce Richey, diabetes researcher and assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.

"The obesity issue is the trigger, and we have a genetic background that sets off that trigger. The result is a diabetes epidemic ... When you become obese, you become less responsive to the insulin that your body is putting out. Then your body realizes that you are becoming resistant, and starts putting out more insulin. Diabetes occurs when your beta cells become so impaired that you are not able to compensate for that resistance that you have."

Richey and other researchers are working feverishly to unravel the mystery of fat, particularly what is it about fat, or in fat, that triggers diabetes. "What we are finding out is that we've always thought of fat as being dormant, taking up space for sure, but not much else," she says.

"But what we are finding out [now] is that fat is like an organ that is secreting things into our system. Fat is not good, especially belly fat. That's the fat that is very unhealthy."

Richey says eating healthy and increasing physical activity are keys to stemming the diabetes epidemic. Catching the disease in its earliest stage is also key. When the disease is in its "pre-diabetes" stage, actions can be taken to prolong, if not prevent, its onset.

A landmark study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health indicated that people with pre-diabetes lowered their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by more than half by losing 5 to 7 percent of their body weight, getting at least 30 minutes of physical activity five days a week and eating healthier.

In addition to lifestyle changes, researchers are also developing new classes of drugs that decrease the rate of developing diabetes if taken early in the disease's progression. Other drugs restore the ability of the pancreas to make insulin more normally and release it more normally.

But presently, nothing can replace the self-determination of a person to keep his or her diabetes in check. Just ask Regina Barrett. The Washington, D.C., native has battled diabetes for five years. And so far, she's winning the fight.

"The changes that I have made are lifestyle changes," says the 51-year-old. "They are not temporary. They are things that, if I want to continue to feel good, if I want to do the best that I can, I have to do. I want to know that I have done all that I possibly can to fight the disease. Right now, I feel healthy, even having diabetes."

DIABETES By The Numbers

*DEATHS: Diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death listed on U.S. death certificates in 2002. This ranking is based on the 73,249 death certificates in which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause of death. According to death certificate reports, diabetes contributed to a total of 224,092 deaths. Diabetes is likely to be underreported as a cause of death. Studies have found that only about 35 percent to 40 percent of decedents with diabetes had it listed anywhere on the death certificate and only about 10 percent to 15 percent had it listed as the underlying cause of death. Overall, the death rate among people with diabetes is about twice that of people without diabetes of similar age.

*HEART DISEASE AND STROKE: Heart disease and stroke account for about 65 percent of deaths in people with diabetes. Adults with diabetes have heart disease death rates about 2 to 4 times higher than adults without diabetes. The risk for stroke is 2 to 4 times higher among people with diabetes.

*HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE: About 73 percent of adults with diabetes have blood pressure greater than or equal to 130/80 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or use prescription medications for hypertension.

*BLINDNESS: Diabetes is the leading cause of new cases of blindness among adults aged 20 to 74 years. Diabetic retinopathy causes 12,000 to 24,000 new cases of blindness each year.

*KIDNEY DISEASE: Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, accounting for 44 percent of new cases in 2002. In 2002, 44,400 people with diabetes began treatment for end-stage kidney disease. In 2002, a total of 153,730 people with end-stage kidney disease due to diabetes were living on chronic dialysis or with a kidney transplant.

*NERVOUS SYSTEM DISEASE: About 60 percent to 70 percent of people with diabetes have mild to severe forms of nervous system damage. The results of such damage include impaired sensation or pain in the feet or hands, slowed digestion of food in the stomach, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other nerve problems. Almost 30 percent of people with diabetes aged 40 years or older have impaired sensation in the feet (i.e., at least one area that lacks feeling). Severe forms of diabetic nerve disease are a major contributing cause of lower-extremity amputations.

*AMPUTATIONS: More than 60 percent of non-traumatic lower-limb amputations occur in people with diabetes. In 2002, about 82,000 non-traumatic lower-limb amputations were performed in people with diabetes.

*ESTIMATED COSTS OF DIABETES IN THE UNITED STATES: $132 billion, with $92 billion in direct medical costs and $40 billion in indirect costs (disability, work loss, premature mortality).

*TYPE 1 AND TYPE 2 DIABETES: Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile-onset diabetes) accounts for 5 percent to 10 percent of all people with diabetes. Type 2 diabetes accounts for the majority of people with diabetes--90 percent to 95 percent.

How DIABETES Is Ravaging The African-American Community

*Thirteen percent (3.2 million) of all African-Americans aged 20 years or older have diabetes.
*Twenty-five percent of African-Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 have diabetes.
*African-Americans are 1.8 times more likely than Whites to have diabetes.
*One in 4 African-American women over 55 years of age has diabetes.
*African-Americans are almost twice as likely as Whites to develop diabetic retinopathy (blindness).
*African-Americans are as much as 5.6 times more likely than Whites to suffer from kidney disease as a result of diabetes complications.
*African-Americans are 2.7 times more likely than Whites to suffer from lower-limb amputations.

Source: American Diabetes Association

Study Examines Unhealthy Behaviors in Response to Stress

May 18, 2010

When people are under chronic stress, they tend to smoke, drink, use drugs and overeat to help cope with stress. These behaviors trigger a biological cascade that helps prevent depression, but they also contribute to a host of physical problems that eventually contribute to early death.

That is the claim of University of Michigan social scientist James S. Jackson and colleagues in an article published in the May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The theory helps explain a long-time epidemiological puzzle: why African Americans have worse physical health than whites but better psychiatric health. "People engage in bad habits for functional reasons, not because of weak character or ignorance," says Jackson, director of the U-M Institute for Social Research.

"Over the life course, coping strategies that are effective in ‘preserving’ the mental health of blacks may work in concert with social, economic and environmental inequalities to produce physical health disparities in middle age and later life."

In an analysis of survey data, obtained from the same people at two points in time, Jackson and colleagues find evidence for their theory.

The relationship between stressful life events and depression varies by the level of unhealthy behaviors. But the direction of that relationship is strikingly different for blacks and whites.

Controlling for the extent of stressful life events a person has experienced, unhealthy behaviors seem to protect against depression in African Americans but lead to higher levels of depression in whites.

"Many black Americans live in chronically precarious and difficult environments," says Jackson. "These environments produce stressful living conditions, and often the most easily accessible options for addressing stress are various unhealthy behaviors.

These behaviors may alleviate stress through the same mechanisms that are believed to contribute to some mental disorders — the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal cortical axis and related biological systems."

Since negative health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use and overeating (especially comfort foods) also have direct and debilitating effects on physical health, these behaviors — along with the difficult living conditions that give rise to them — contribute to the disparities in mortality and physical health problems between black and white populations.

These disparities in physical health and mortality are greatest at middle age and beyond, Jackson says. Why? "At younger ages, blacks are able to employ a variety of strategies that, when combined with the more robust physical health of youth, effectively mask the cascade to the negative health effects," Jackson said.

"But as people get older, they tend to reduce stress more often by engaging in bad habits." Black women show heightened rates of obesity over the life course, he points out.

In fact, by the time they are in their 40s, 60 percent of African American women are obese. "How can it be that 60 percent of the population has a character flaw?" Jackson asks.

"Overeating is an effective, early, well-learned response to chronic environmental stressors that only strengthens over the life course. In contrast, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, black American men’s coping choices are different.

"Early in life, they tend to be physically active and athletic, which produces the stress-lowering hormone dopamine. But in middle age, physical deterioration reduces the viability and effectiveness of this way of coping with stress, and black men turn in increasing numbers to unhealthy coping behaviors, showing increased rates of smoking, drinking and illicit drug use."

Racial disparities in physical illnesses and mortality are not really a result of race at all, Jackson says. Instead, they are a result of how people live their lives, the composition of their lives. These disparities are not just a function of socioeconomic status, but of a wide range of conditions including the accretion of micro insults that people are exposed to over the years.

"You can’t really study physical health without looking at people’s mental health and really their whole lives," he said. "The most effective way to address an important source of physical health disparities is to reduce environmentally produced stressors — both those related to race and those that are not.

We need to improve living conditions, create good job opportunities, eliminate poverty and improve the quality of inner-city urban life. "Paradoxically, the lack of attention to these conditions contributes to the use of unhealthy coping behaviors by people living in poor conditions.

Although these unhealthy coping behaviors contribute to lower rates of mental disorder, over the life course they play a significant role in leading to higher rates of physical health problems and earlier mortality than is found in the general population."

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

By Brandon Keim

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life, particularly African-American children who suffer disproportionately from racism related poverty and stress.

"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many.

Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school.

Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

Evans and Schamberg’s findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete.

In addition to poverty’s many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too.

"A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood," they wrote.

To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female.

In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students’ blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items.

So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It’s in these brain regions that working memory is centered.

Evans and Schamberg didn’t scan their human subjects’ brains, but the test results suggest that the same basic mechanisms operate in kids.

"Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models," said Rockefeller University neuro - endocrinologist Bruce McEwen. "Now there are beginnings of work on our own species. The Evans paper is an important step in that direction."

McEwen also noted that, at least in animals, the effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty’s effects could be hereditary.

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. "They’re not really saying which causal events were stressful. They’re just measuring biological markers of stress," said Kim Noble, a Columbia University psycho-biologist who studies the relationship between child poverty and cognition. Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured.

"I think that different cognitive outcomes have different causes," said Noble. "Something like working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be associated with hours spent reading to your children."

But Noble still said the study "was very well-done. They have an impressive data set." And though some details remain incomplete, she said, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.

"Policy changes that affect environments that might affect cognitive development and brain change — that’s the ultimate future of the field," she said.

Racism Related Stress

According to Utsey (1998), race-related stress is the discomfort experienced by African Americans who observe or directly experience racial discrimination in their daily lives at the individual, cultural, or institutional level. 

Harrell (2000) utilized the term ‘racism-related stress’ (rather than race-related stress) to emphasize the link between stress and racism, thereby focusing on the environmental experience of racism rather than just on the racial group membership of an individual.

The multidimensional layers of racism (individual, institutional, and cultural), as described by Jones (1997), is a basis for much of the literature on race-related stress.

Individual racism typically occurs on the personal level, where racial prejudice is acted out, either consciously or unconsciously within some interpersonal interaction.

Institutional racism is an institutionalized version of the individual act of racism in which institutional practices and policies are based in the belief of racial superiority of one group over another.

Cultural racism is demonstrated through the assertion of the dominant group's cultural heritage and values (i.e., traditions, language, arts, values) over the values, beliefs, and traditions of all other groups. These levels of racism are both insidious and chronic and likely test the individual and collective resources and resolve of Black people.

Racism-related stress, perceived discrimination, and racism have been linked with many psychological and health related variables such as negative self-esteem, concentration difficulties, intrusive thoughts about specific racism encounters, and increased risk for mental and physical illness such as depression, anxiety, hypertension, or headaches (Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999; Essed, 1990; Landrine & Klonoff, 1996; Lopez, 2005; Outlaw, 1993; Utsey, Ponterotto, Reynolds, & Cancelli, 2000).

The cumulative effect of the stress and strain of daily racism has been shown to negatively affect the health and well-being of Black people and diminish their quality of life (Ponterotto, Utsey, & Pedersen, 2006).