Collective Trauma

Foster-Frau, S. (2021, April 8). When mass shootings target a marginalized group, trauma ripples through those communities. Washington Post.

A collective trauma is a traumatic psychological experience shared by a large group of people that can include an entire society. These collective traumas can afflict large cultural groups, and some examples of this include the trauma of slavery in the United States, the Nazi Holocaust, and genocide of Native Americans. Traumatization from these experiences is passed down as a cultural trauma, and this is slow to heal when aspects of the trauma are ongoing in the form of oppression and discrimination.

Read more about collective trauma in this exclusive Interview with Monnica Williams, PhD, ABPP on Collective Trauma by the National Center for Integrated Behavioral Health at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Traumatic Experiences in Black Communities

National Survey of American Life (NSAL)

A Comparison of Sex Differences in Trauma Exposure Among Black Ethnic Groups

The National Survey of American Life (NSAL) is an epidemiological study of ethnoracial differences in psychiatric disorders and service use amongst Black communities within the United States, compared with their White counterparts. From this data, we explored possible gender differences in varied forms of lifetime trauma exposure among African Americans and Black Caribbeans. Prior to this work, very little attention had been paid to the ethnic or gender differences between the two groups, making the development of culturally tailored prevention and treatment strategies for PTSD near impossible. This study is among the first to characterize the heterogenous experiences of traumatic events within different Black communities in the U.S.

Learn More

Gran-Ruaz, S., Taylor, R. J., Jacob, G., & Williams, M. T. (2022). Lifetime trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder among African Americans and Black Caribbeans by sex and ethnicity. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13(889060), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.889060