ABSTRACT
This comparative review explores how, during COVID-19 and recent American public health disasters, including the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Maria, early failures in public health communications, porous epidemiologic oversight, and lax crisis management created significant gaps in outreach and treatment for historically disenfranchised racial/ethnic minorities. In consideration of each event's broader specter in terms of population health inequities, a highly salient but underresearched dynamic emerges: the development of heightened psychological sequelae including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress, factors linked to civic and health care system disengagement and poorer overall health. This excess mental illness morbidity can be said to fall under the umbrella of intersectional trauma, or psychological harm and psychosocial vulnerability produced through the accumulation of cultural, political, economic, and ecologic stressors tied to salient identity markers such as race or ethnicity. During COVID-19, reports have presaged race- and class-specific disparities in infections and mortality, with evidence highlighting adverse effects on the "psychosocial contract," public trust and faith in government and health care systems which is borne from relational experiences tied to one's identity markers. We discuss how COVID-19's kinetic and fluid political dynamics may add to the burden of mental illness and trauma in racial/ethnic minority communities in the United States and further entrench said disparities, closing with potential strategies for mitigation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)