Police killing unarmed blacks affects mental health of African Americans, study says
Researchers say the rising death toll could account for up to 65 million excess days of stress or depression per year
The disproportionately high rate at which unarmed black people die at the hands of police in the United States has a corrosive impact on the mental health of black Americans, researchers reported Friday.
The frequency of these killings has been cited as symptomatic of deeply rooted racism, and is in any case perceived as such by most black Americans, they reported in The Lancet, a medical journal.
Audio or video evidence of such deaths over the last few years has given rise to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, whether in the form of street protests or National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem before games.
“We found that when police kill unarmed black Americans, there is mental health fallout that reverberates throughout the black American community,” said senior author Alexander Tsai, an associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
“This finding is significant because it shows that the effects of these killings go beyond immediate friends and family,” he told AFP.