It’s a long-standing mystery in public health: despite the inarguably vast number of psychological and sociological stresses they face in the U.S., African Americans are mentally healthier than white people. The phenomenon is formally described as the “race paradox in mental health”.
The paradox became apparent in the mid-1990s. Since then, an overwhelming majority of research has confirmed lower rates of most major psychiatric disorders, including depression, panic disorder, anxiety, and alcohol dependence. It’s not just an absence of problems: Cory L. M. Keyes of Emory University found that “even when assessed by a subset of the signs of overall (flourishing) mental health or the diagnosis of mental health as a complete state — the absence of mental disorders and the presence of flourishing — Blacks have better mental health than Whites.”
This has invited a lot of speculation. (Let’s quickly dismiss the ideas that African Americans are simply not going to the doctor, or drowning their sorrows in substances. These putative explanations have been thoroughly debunked.) More credible theories tie the improved mental well-being to more supportive family relationships. Or they point to what are called “fictive kin” relationships, a term that refers to the unofficial family structures that develop in communities where people, for one reason or another, choose not to settle into standard nuclear family structures.
But when Dawne Mouzon set out to tease apart whether these factors offered a credible explanation, they came up short. In an investigation published last week, Mouzon — a sociologist who teaches public policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey — dispensed with much of the received wisdom. For example, she writes that “neither the quality nor quality of family relationships can explain the race paradox in mental health.”
Instead, Mouzon concluded that “it is plausible that African Americans possess other resilience mechanisms (e.g., other social relationships, different types of coping strategies) that I was unable to consider here.”
I like that word: resilience. Continue reading
