How unjust police killings damage the mental health of Black Americans

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/how-unjust-police-killings-damage-the-mental-health-of-black-americans/

Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, many African Americans have reported feeling overwhelmed at times by the trauma, anguish, and outrage stirred up by Floyd’s death, as well as other incidents of police violence against Black victims. The disturbing frequency of these events, and the relentless news coverage of them in the last year, has been taking a real emotional toll.

A first-ever study in 2018 found that a police killing of an unarmed African American triggered days of poor mental health for Black people living in that state over the following three months — a significant problem given there are about 1,000 police killings annually on average, with African Americans comprising a disproportionate 25 percent to 30 percent of those. The accumulation of painful days over the course of a year was comparable to the rate experienced by diabetics, according to the study’s author, David R. Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Williams, a leading expert on the social influences of health and a professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University, spoke with the Gazette about what he’s seen in the past year, the mental and physical tolls discrimination take on Black lives and what individuals can do to help mitigate them.

(A Q&A follows at the link.)

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Afternoon kick

[Elessar Zappa]

2. I can't even imagine how traumatic

all of this must be.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. "Society" and the police typically ask...

“What’s wrong with you?”

Instead, they should ask:

“What happened to you?”

African Americans experience all manner of injury from conception.