Last week, I wrote a bit about the Black Lives Matters movement and the incredible stress and strain that racism is causing people of color. This is a topic that I really think demands further exploration.
First, I mentioned it last week, but check this article out in more depth. Rates of anxiety and depression spiked, hard, for African & Asian Americans in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Among African Americans, positive screenings for these disorders rose from 36% to 41%, while they increased from 28% to 34% among Asian Americans. Those are all significant increases.
Interestingly enough, it did not increase for members of the Hispanic population. I’d be curious to better understand why that is the case, but that’s for another day.
Tragically, the reason we have this data is because the federal government was attempting to track the impacts of COVID-19 on minority populations, which, as we know, has been hit particularly hard by this pandemic. One tragedy upon another.
If these findings are accurate and representative of the increasing rates of mental illness among the general public, it means that at least two million more people experienced mental illness as the result of the murder of George Floyd. These are horrifying numbers, but they really aren’t all that surprising.
We know, definitively, that external forces can increase rates of mental illness. Depression, anxiety, and suicide all rise in times of economic turmoil and it makes tragic sense that a group of people who are under perpetual attack at an individual and societal level would experience rising rates of mental illness when a horrific video showed a slow-motion murder.
What does this mean? Again, the good news…such as it is…is that we, as a society, are having a larger conversation about systemic racism. I worry that too much of the conversation has focused on police brutality and criminal justice reform. That is important, no question, and its the primary issue in front of us at the moment. However, we cannot lose sight of the impact that centuries of racism have had on countless other areas of life.
One of those must be mental health.
As a white man, I cannot personally understand the impact of racism on mental health. But the literature and personal experience of countless people of color are clear. Racism means lost opportunities. It means personal pain and lives destroyed. It also means the trauma of watching countless people who look and act like you being gunned down by the men and women who are supposed to protect you.
What’s my point of this entry? The article above proves it: Police brutality and systemic racism mean depression. They mean mental health. And as we have a conversation about what Black Lives Matters means, we cannot forget this vitally important component of addressing and ending systemic racism.
Mike Schlossberg - Author 