Commentary on the special issue on disproportionate exposure to trauma: Trauma, stress, and adversities and health disparities among disenfranchised groups globally during the COVID pandemic.

ABSTRACT

The papers in this Journal of Traumatic Stress special issue on disproportionate adversity cover the gamut of discrimination traumas and stressors, including microaggressions, a more insidious forms of discrimination, and their often-devastating and wide-ranging mental health sequelae, in disproportionately affected disenfranchised groups. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation commonly confers cumulative and chronic effects. In the field of traumatic stress studies, several types of identity-linked traumatic events have been identified and empirically investigated as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-producing experiences. Collectively, the 13 papers included in this special issue raise questions about the definition, conceptualization, and categorization of various forms of explicit and implicit identity-linked trauma. These papers highlight the need for acceptance of a shared nomenclature and better differentiation of both causal and correlational associations with acute and chronic PTSD, depression, suicide risk, alcohol misuse, and other mental health outcomes. In this commentary, the discussion is extended to COVID-19, a disease that has been globally devastating for many. On multiple levels (i.e., physical, mental, emotional, economic, and social), COVID-19 has magnified the prepandemic fault lines of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Applying a syndemic framework to the health impact of COVID-19 and, arguably, the most pervasive identity linked epidemic worldwide-systemic racism-brings perspective to the biological and social forces that are likely to be driving the convergence of COVID-19, systemic racism, and chronic health inequities, and may be informative in guiding evidence-based strategies for managing racial trauma in the context of COVID-19.