US News: How Police Shootings Affect The Mental Health Of Black Americans

“‘Police kill more than 300 black Americans – at least a quarter of them unarmed – each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected.’

That was the premise behind a study released in June in the Lancet, and its author says it’s the first to look at ‘institutional racism.’

Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani is an assistant professor in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a board-certified general internist at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The idea for the study, he says, came from personal experience. “Friends and patients of mine would often make statements that belied the trauma they had felt every time one of these incidents happened,” he says. ‘More colloquially, people would make statements about how their anxiety rose or they had PTSD, how they felt incredibly defeated or depressed after one of these events happened.'” Read more at US News