Police Shootings of Unarmed Blacks Adversely Impact Mental Health in Black Community

Police shootings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on the mental health of other black Americans in the general population, according to astudy published Thursday inThe Lancet. The report was released just two days after a police officer shot and killed Antwon Rose, an unarmed black teen who was fleeing a traffic stop in Pittsburgh.Exposure to one or more police killings within a three-month period was associated with a 0.35 day increase in poor mental health days, according to the report, which combined data on police shootings with individual-level data from a nationally representative self-report survey on health. Adverse mental health effects were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans (not unarmed white Americans or armed black Americans).“The observed adverse mental health spillover effects of police killings of unarmed black Americans could result from heightened perceptions of threat and vulnerability, lack of fairness, lower social status, lower beliefs about one’s own worth, activation of prior traumas, and identification wi th the deceased,” Jacob Bor, Sc.D., of Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues wrote. The researchers used self-reported race to identify black American respondents to the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a nationally representative telephone survey that collects health data from U.S. adults. Information collected fro...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: adverse mental health effects Antwon Rose Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System black Americans BRFSS Jacob Bor Mapping Police Violence database police shootings Rahn Bailey The Lancet Source Type: research