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A racism thread. Research has shown similar courses of mental illness between victims of violent crime & victims of racism. Epigenetics tells us racism impacts in the same way as a traumatic event. The impulsive nature of Indigenous suicides makes sense from a trauma perspective
The best I can do as a clinician is assist my clients 2 develop robust cultural identity & the skills & resilience to manage racist events. Cultural resilience assessment enables clinicians to ‘treat’ those factors demonstrated 2 buffer suicide risk. This is crucial to prevention
Just as trauma frequently becomes a central organizing principle in the psychological structure of the individual, trauma has become a central organizing principle in the psychological structure of whole communities.
This is known as ‘repetition compulsion’ meaning those individuals who have had a previous traumatic event are at increased risk for future trauma experiences. Suicide ‘clusters’ being an obvious and common consequence of trauma repetition compulsion.
Makes enormous sense to any “marginalised group” swap racism for “prejudice” and you go some way to seeing why there is over representation of suicides amongst minority populations
