Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"You know when something startles you or when something threatens you, and you get that fight or flight signal, your heart rate races, your blood pressure goes up, your muscles tense up -- people can feel those effects. The other effects that people don't realize is that your stress hormones go up, they cause your blood sugar to go up, they cause your blood vessels to narrow. And so when you're in this constant state of fight or flight because of pervasive daily interactions with racism -- and the studies show that when you control for poverty, when you control for gender, when you control for all of those other factors, the singlular standing factor, racism, actually leads to increased chornic medical illness, premature death for Black people, increased rates of diabetes, increased deaths from stroke, increased deaths from heart attacks, increased heart disease, increased depression, increased psychological distress, increased substance use disorders -- all that can specifically be tied back to racism and this 'weathering' effect. So yes, the data is there, and a chronic trauma is the right clinical term to use.

[... after being asked about suicide and suicidal-ideation rates: ...]

"There are structural things that we could be doing. And so if you look at the basic psychological needs of a human being it's to be respected, cared for, accepted. We have so much stigma and so much judgement and so much discrimination and so much marginalization around so many factors in this country, and each and every one of those is feeding the suicide crisis that we have. So poverty, basic needs not met -- people who live in poverty are undervalued by society; we literally don't care if you live or if you die. LGBTQ folks, Black folks, immigrants, women -- if you look at all of the ways that we marginalize people, and all of those identity-threats, all of those experiences with marginalization, discrimination, and not having that basic need of being valued, respected, cared for, and accepted, drives the suicide rate."

-- Dr. Nzinga Harrison (naharrisonmd), interviewed by DeRay McKesson on Pod Save The People (PodSaveThePpl), 2020-08-25