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RACISM AND PSYCHOSOMATICS Racism is a belief in the inferiority of a person caused by prejudice against their ethnic group, phenotypic characteristics, or purported biological nature. Depending on the situation and the individual person, a single racist incident can cause significant physiological harm to the victim. In fact, there is beginning to be a great deal of research on different health risks association with race-related stress in African Americans. Race-related stress is the psychological discomfort that results from a situation or event that an individual appraises as troubling because of racial discrimination or isolation. This psychological discomfort can lead to the development of many health-related side effects, due to '''psychosomatics'''. Sigmund Freud coined this term, which means having real bodily problems (soma) caused by psychological problems (psycho). When it comes to racism, the excess stress leads African Americans as a group to have many extra health problems that other races do not encounter on as large of a scale. POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is usually discussed when talking about soldiers coming back from war. After an incredibly traumatic experience (such as going to war), PTSD may appear-symptoms are: intense fear, helplessness, reexperiencing the incident, and numbing. It has just been discovered that racist experiences can cause Post-Trauma-like symptoms in the victim. In 1990, GE Wyatt came up with a comparison of a racist incident to childhood sexual abuse. Both cause feelings of shock, betrayal, and a feeling of powerlessness. There is also a ''Racism-Rape Parallel Theory'', which makes parallels of racism and rape by showing that both are motivated by a drive for power, and this power is maintained by creating myths about the victime (i.e. the female is permisuous, or the race-victim is uncivilized, etc.). Both victimes display a difficulty in trusting any person who is similar to their assailant. There are very serious health problems associated with PTSD. Emotional trauma has been proven to suppress Natural Killer Cell . NK Cells are the cells in the body which atack foreign matter. They attack tumor cells, and are very important in maintaining a healthy life. The suppression of these cells is very serious- it leaves the body vulnerable to any disease coming. The breakdown of immunity can lead to Cancer , Diabetes Mellitus , and autoimmune diseases. NK cell activity is affected by depression and anxiety, PTSD and emotional trauma, and self criticism, all which are side effects of racist incidents. This may help to explain why the African American community experiences greater instances of cancer, diabetes, and Hypertension . HYPERTENSION African Americans have higher rates of hyptertension than any other race. These high rates have been shown to persist across socioeconomic groups. African Americans tend to have an elevated blood pressure because of the stressors in their lives. Discrimination is highly linking to hypertension. ''Krieger'' did a survery to find out how prevalent racism really is in the US. Two thirds of his black respondents had experienced one or more racist incident. Another survey found that 60% of black participants felt they had been victimized in the past three years. This shows that racism is still very prevalent in the lives of African Americans. Racist incidents are never far from consciousness in the victim. They require expenditures of great amounts of energy to try and cope with the incident. All of this leafs to hightened levels of stress in African Americans, which compromises their overall health. CORONARY HEART DISEASE Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in African Americans, followed by stroke, cancer, hypertension, cirrhosis, diabetes, and AIDS. In a study of talking to elderly African American women with CHD, ''Geronimus'' coined the term Weathering to describe the worsening hearts of the African American women. This means that they are at a much higher risk of developing CHD because of Institutional Racism and other racist incidents, which build up over time to harm them. Their "bad heart" is due to increased stress in their everyday lives. The incredibly high instance of CHD in African Americans is just another example of how stress due to racism builds up over time in African Americans, causing them physical harm and leaving their body with less defense than they should have. REFERENCES
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