Suicide is a public health problem for African Americans who are young and of working age. The purpose of this study was to examine mediated and moderated effects of perceived racism on suicide ideation in a community sample of 236 African American men and women. Measures of suicide ideation, depression symptoms, intrinsic/extrinsic religiosity, and perceived racism were administered. Perceived racial discrimination was directly and indirectly associated with suicide ideation. For participants who reported low levels of extrinsic religiosity, the mediated effect of perceived racism (via depression symptoms) was significant. These findings provide some insight into suicide vulnerability for specific subgroups of African Americans.

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Background: Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) is proposed for inclusion in the ICD-11 as a diagnosis distinct from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), reflecting deficits in affective, self-concept, and relational domains. There remains significant controversy over whether CPTSD provides useful diagnostic information beyond PTSD and other comorbid conditions, such as depression or substance use disorders. Objective: The present study examined differences in psychiatric presentation for three groups: traumatized controls, DSM-5 PTSD subjects, and ICD-11 CPTSD subjects. Method: The sample included 190 African American women recruited from an urban public hospital where rates of trauma exposure are high. PTSD was measured using Clinician Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 and CPTSD was measured using clinician administered ICD-Trauma Interview. Psychiatric diagnoses and emotion dysregulation were also assessed. In a subset of women (n = 60), emotion recognition was measured using the Penn Emotion Recognition Task. Results: There were significant differences across groups on current and lifetime major depression (p < .001) and current and lifetime alcohol and substance dependence (p < .05), with CPTSD showing the highest rates of comorbidities. CPTSD women also showed significantly higher levels of childhood abuse and lower rates of adult secure attachment. Multivariate analysis of variance showed significantly more severe PTSD and depression symptoms and, as expected, more severe emotion dysregulation and dissociation, compared to DSM-5 PTSD and traumatized control groups. Individuals with CPTSD also had higher levels of emotion recognition to faces on a computer-based behavioural assessment, which may be related to heightened vigilance toward emotional cues from others. CPTSD women had better facial emotion recognition on a computer-based assessment, which may suggest heightened vigilance toward emotional cues. Conclusions: Our results suggest clear, clinically-relevant differences between PTSD and CPTSD, and highlight the need for further research on this topic with other traumatized populations, particularly studies that combine clinical and neurobiological data.

Objective: This study examined the role of depressive symptoms in mediating the relationship between early life experiences of racial discrimination and accelerated aging in adulthood for African Americans (i.e., prediction over a 19-year period, from ages 10 to 29) after adjusting for gender and health behaviors. Method: Longitudinal self-report data over 7 waves of data collection from the Family and Community Health Study were utilized. The sample included 368 African Americans with usable gene expression data to compute accelerated aging, as well as complete data on all self-report variables including racial discrimination (Schedule of Racist Events) and depression (Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Version 4). Blood was collected by antecubital blood draws from participants at age 29. The proposed model was tested by path analysis. Results: Findings revealed that high discrimination at ages 10 -15 was associated with depression at ages 20 -29 (␤ ϭ .19, p ϭ .001), controlling for depression at ages 10 -15, which, in turn, was related to accelerated cellular-level aging (␤ ϭ .11, p ϭ .048) after controlling for gender, alcohol consumption, and cigarette use. The indirect effect of racial discrimination on aging through depression at ages 20 -29 was significant (␤ ϭ .021, 95% confidence interval [.001, .057]), accounting for 32.3% of the total variance. Conclusion: These findings support research conceptualizations that early life stress due to racial discrimination lead to sustained negative affective states continuing into young adulthood that confer risk for accelerated aging and possibly premature disease and mortality in African Americans. These findings advance knowledge of potential underlying mechanisms that influence racial health disparities.

IMPORTANCE Racial discrimination has a clear impact on health-related outcomes, but little is known about how discriminatory experiences are associated with neural response patterns to emotionally salient cues, which likely mediates these outcomes.OBJECTIVE To examine associations of discriminatory experiences with brainwide response to threat-relevant cues in trauma-exposed US Black women as they engage in an attentionally demanding task. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTSA cross-sectional study was conducted from May 1, 2014, to July 1, 2019, among 55 trauma-exposed US Black women to examine associations of racial discrimination experiences with patterns of neural response and behavior to trauma-relevant images in an affective attentional control task. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and trauma exposure were entered as covariates to isolate variance associated with experiences of racial discrimination.EXPOSURES Varying levels of trauma, PTSD symptoms, and experiences of racial discrimination.MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Experiences of Discrimination Questionnaire (EOD) (range, 0-9) for count of the number of situations for which each participant reported having unfair treatment for a racial reason. Experiences of trauma and PTSD symptoms were assessed with the Traumatic Events Inventory (TEI) (number of times the person was exposed to trauma; score range, 0-112) and PTSD Symptom Scale (PSS) (score range, 0-51). Response to trauma-relevant vs neutral distractor cues were assessed via functional magnetic resonance imaging during performance of an affective Stroop (attentional control) task. Statistical analyses were conducted at a whole-brain, voxelwise level with familywise error correction. RESULTSIn this study of 55 Black women in the US (mean [SD] age, 37.7 [10.7] years; range, 21-61 years), participants reported a mean (SD) TEI frequency of 33.0 (18.8) and showed moderate levels of current PTSD symptoms (mean [SD] PSS score, 15.4 [12.9]). Mean (SD) EOD scores were 2.35 (2.44) and were moderately correlated with current PTSD symptoms (PSS total: r = 0.36; P=.009) but not with age (r = 0.20; P = .15) or TEI frequency (r = -0.02; P = .89). During attention to trauma-relevant vs neutral images, more experiences of racial discrimination were associated with significantly greater response in nodes of emotion regulation and fear inhibition (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and visual attention (middle occipital cortex) networks, even after accounting for trauma and severity of PTSD symptoms (brainwide familywise error corrected; r = 0.33 for ventromedial prefrontal cortex; P = .02). Racial discrimination was also associated with affective Stroop task performance; errors on trials with threat-relevant stimuli were negatively correlated with experiences of racial discrimination (r = −0.41; P = .003).CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE These findings suggest that experiences of racial discrimination associate with disproportionately greater response in brain regions associated with emotion regulation and fear inhibiti...

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Significant racial health disparities in infant mortality, preterm birth, and infant neurodevelopment exist in the United States. These disparities highlight a critical public health problem: Children of color are at a developmental disadvantage before birth. In this article, we describe how pregnant women from marginalized communities are disproportionately more likely to experience chronic stress in the form of discrimination, historical trauma, and acculturation. We integrate these understudied forms of chronic stress into allostatic load and prenatal programming models to describe how they can affect the health of two generations: the pregnant woman and her child. We describe psychophysiological ramifications of this early‐life stress in infants of color. The prenatal programming field has largely ignored the experiences of women of color, and we highlight the need for researchers to include, or focus exclusively on, diverse samples in their research to reduce disparities that are evident at birth.

Racial and cultural personal characteristics such as racial identity and Africentric orientation may serve an important protective function for BP in African American young adults.