Alleviating the Mental Health Burden of Structural Discrimination and Hate Crimes: The Role of Psychiatrists.

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. Keywords: Mental health, hate crime, migration, refugees, human capital.

Hate crimes and psychiatric emergency department visits among Asian Americans.

This paper explores the methodological aspects of a user‐led study investigating mental health service user experiences of targeted violence and abuse (often called 'hate crime'). 'Keeping Control' was a 16‐month qualitative study, undertaken in the context of adult safeguarding reforms in England. By collecting data on service user concepts and experiences, the research sought to address a gap in research and practice knowledge relating to targeted violence, abuse and hostility against people with mental health problems. In this paper, we discuss the significance of the design and methodology used for this study, with a particular focus on the interviews with service users. The research was both user‐led and carried out in collaboration with practitioners and academics, a form of research co‐production. Our aim is to inform researchers, practitioners and policymakers about the value of user leadership in co‐productive research with practitioners, particularly for a highly sensitive and potentially distressing topic.

The rise in race-based hate crimes and groups should not only be examined as an individual- or group-level issue but as indicators that reflect state-level norms of hate and degradation toward racial minority groups. Specifically, for racial minority individuals residing in states that yield higher rates of hate crimes and groups, this may reflect a greater hate culture, and the distress associated with racism may be exacerbated, compared to those residing in states with less of a hate culture (e.g., lower numbers of hate crimes and groups). Thus, to test these assertions, we examined whether state-level indicators of race-based hate crimes and groups would moderate the relationship between perceived racism (offline and online) and stress among racial minority individuals. Using data from 935 racial minority adults across 43 states, a multilevel analysis was conducted with online and offline racism predicting distress at level 1, and the total number of hate crimes and groups moderating this relationship at level 2 (state-level). Between hate crimes and groups, only hate groups was a significant indicator moderating this link. In states with a low number of hate groups, the link between offline racism and stress was not significant while this link was significant in states with a high number of hate groups. Online racism was significantly associated with stress, but this link was not moderated by any of the hate indicators. The findings suggest that the presence and activity of hate groups may be a significant contextual factor in understanding the salience of racial discrimination. Implications for research are discussed.

Traditionally, the literature has sought to understand the impact of racial minority status and trauma as it relates to interpersonal violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault. What has not been as extensively reviewed and summarized is how racially or ethnically motivated hate crimes impact the mental health of minorities—particularly Latinx/Hispanic groups. This review aims to summarize the current body of literature on the intersection of race-motivated hate crime and trauma responses within Latinx community. To do so, the theoretical foundation for this inquiry will build from a race-based trauma perspective. Specifically, this review connects existing frameworks for race and trauma and integrates literature that examines Latinx or Hispanic populations that have experienced discrimination, bias, or hate crime as a result of their identity or perceived identity. The importance of situating bias or hate events within the trauma literature stems from a lack of overall formal evaluation of these events, and how these occurrences are historically overlooked as a traumatic stressor. The findings of this review suggest that (1) experiencing racially motivated victimization can cause adverse mental and physical health outcomes in Latinxs and (2) currently, there is only one study that has examined the impact of hate crime on Latinxs in the United States. This leaves the field with unanswered questions about the impact of hate crime victimization among Latinxs, which is an ever-growing area in need of attention.

Purpose: The purpose of our study was to examine the effects of mental distress (depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]), incarceration, and hate crime on stimulant use (methamphetamine, crack, and cocaine) among transgender women. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of longitudinal data collected from 2016 to 2018 with 429 transgender women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Generalized estimating equation log-binomial regressions were used to calculate relative risks of stimulant use associated with mental distress, incarceration, and hate crime. Results: At baseline, transgender women experienced transphobic hate crime (46.4%), incarceration (53.0%), mental distress (69.2%), and stimulant use (28.4%). Transgender women who used stimulants reported lower education (45.1%, χ2 = 14.3, p = 0.001) and significantly more had been incarcerated (62.3%, χ2 = 5.9, p = 0.015), and reported diagnoses of depression (67.8%, χ2 = 6.1, p = 0.014), anxiety (62.8%, χ2 = 4.3, p = 0.039), and PTSD (43.8%, χ2 = 6.7, p = 0.010). Longitudinal multivariate analysis found that depression (adjusted relative risk [aRR] = 1.46, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.09-1.95), anxiety (aRR = 1.42, 95% CI = 1.05-1.93), and PTSD (aRR = 1.38, 95% CI = 1.02-1.87) were associated with methamphetamine use but not with crack or cocaine use. Incarceration was associated with methamphetamine use and crack use, whereas experiencing hate crime was associated with crack use. Conclusions: Mental distress, incarceration, and hate crime were key exposures of stimulant use among transgender women. Intervention targets for reducing stimulant use should consider working upstream by addressing underlying stressors impacting mental health for transgender women, including laws to protect transgender women from hate crime and to reduce their disproportionate representation in the criminal justice system.

Introduction: Unacceptable experiences (UEs) are commonly reported by undergraduate students. However, their prevalence and impact have not been rigorously studied. Objectives: To (1) estimate the prevalence of UEs, (2) identify high-risk subgroups, and (3) examine associations with mental health and academic outcomes among undergraduate students attending Queen's University. Methods: Data from the 2021/2022-2023/2024 cycles of the U-Flourish Student Well-Being Survey were collected at the beginning and completion of each academic year. Validated symptom measures included the GAD-7 (anxiety), PHQ-9 (depression), C-SSRS (suicidal thoughts and behaviours), and WEMWBS-7 (well-being). Self-reported UEs included: sexual violence or harassment, physical assault, bullying, hate crimes, and discrimination. Multivariable regression examined associations between UEs and student mental health, and grade-point average (GPA) from linked university data. Results: One-third (28.9%) of students (n=797/2,757) reported an unacceptable experience over the academic year. Sexual violence or harassment and discrimination (15%) were most frequently reported, followed by bullying/harassment (11%), hate crimes (4.6%) and physical assault (3.3%). UEs were highest in students who identified as non-binary gender (49%), 2SLGBTQIA+ sexuality (39%) or had a history of mental illness (41%). These UEs increased the risk of reporting clinically significant anxiety and depressive symptoms by 5-18% and 11-40%, respectively, and Students reporting UEs were also more likely (2-59%) to report having suicidal thoughts and behaviours over the academic year, particularly those who experienced sexual violence (RR:1.59; 95% CI:1.10-2.23). There was evidence that sexual violence, bullying, and hate crimes were associated with lower GPAs among first-year students. Conclusion: UEs are common among undergraduate students and are associated with significant negative mental health and well-being outcomes. Further research is needed to better understand the nature of these UEs and the mechanisms by which they impact student mental health and academic performance. This information is pivotal to develop evidence-informed prevention and early intervention initiatives.

The Name of Hate

Demonstrations led by right-wing extremist groups and racially motivated hate crimes have increased significantly since the 2016 election of Donald Trump (Edwards and Rushin in The effect of Trump’s election on hate crimes. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3102652 , 2018). However, few studies have examined racially marginalized (RM) persons’ perceptions of such events or their potential impact on mental health for this population. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to examine the association between RM individuals’ perceptions of the 2017 Unite the Right rally as a racially motivated hate crime and subsequent perceived stress. Additionally, we investigated the moderating role of interpersonal proximity (i.e., direct or indirect knowledge of someone personally affected by the events that occurred at the rally) in the relationship between hate crime perceptions and stress. Survey data were collected from 388 RM adults living in Virginia at the time of the rally. Our results suggest that perceiving the rally as a hate crime was positively associated with greater levels of stress. Moreover, interpersonal proximity moderated this association, such that the relationship between hate crime perceptions and stress was significant and positive for those who knew someone affected by the rally, but unrelated for RM people who did not know someone affected by the rally. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Youth hate crimes are a societal problem in which young people turn extremist ideas into acts of violence. To develop methods for prevention, early identification, and intervention, mental health professionals must have an awareness and understanding of this issue. To provide a basis for developing such an understanding, the authors review the current research related to youth hate crimes. The authors review the literature primarily from the past 10 years on youth hate crimes. Studies have established that most hate crimes are committed by single or small groups of young males unaffiliated with organized hate groups. Although limited information is available about the causative factors of hatred, a variety of prevention and intervention strategies have been employed. Yet, little has been done to evaluate these various initiatives. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of literature available to guide mental health professionals in the identification, evaluation, and treatment of offenders, despite increasing concerns and awareness regarding the profound consequences of acts of hatred and extremism. Heightened public awareness and greater understanding of the epidemiology and nature of hate crimes is necessary if perpetrators are to be recognized and effective interventions developed. To achieve this goal, databases of juvenile hate crimes must be developed nationwide, and the success of preventive, educational, and alternative sentencing programs must be assessed. Mental health professionals play a critical role in the detection and treatment of juvenile perpetrators, and it is incumbent upon them to develop interventions for individuals and communities affected by hate crimes.

In October 2016, a burning liquid was thrown over a bus driver in Brisbane, Australia. It was reported across the world that the 29-year-old bus driver was a Punjabi Indian and that his killing may have been a hate crime. A subsequent independent inquiry found that 50-year-old Anthony O’Donohue, who was charged with murder and other offences, had a long history of mental illness and had been discharged from treatment from a community mental health service four-and-a-half months earlier. In August 2018, the Queensland Mental Health Court found that, at the time of the alleged offences, Mr O’Donohue was of unsound mind and acquitted him of all charges. The case provides an opportunity to consider the decision making of a mental health service in the prelude to a major critical incident. The case also highlights the tension between the principles of patient autonomy and the ‘recovery model’ of mental illness on the one hand and the need to assertively manage persons who have no insight into their serious mental illness and are at risk of harming themselves or others.

The aim of the current paper is to provide an applied introduction and overview of Bayesian methodology, how it compares from commonly used frequentist methods, and to elaborate on the utility of Bayesian methods in trauma and mental health research. Using data from the second wave of the Longitudinal Examination of Victimization Experiences of Latinos (LEVEL) study (N = 323) we ran frequentist modeling using OLS regression to test the effects of lifetime victimization, hate crime, and noncriminal bias events on anxiety, depression, anger, and dissociation. For the Bayesian analyses, we replicate these regressions using both weakly informative and highly informative priors, as well as a likelihood function that addresses data skew. Results across the 3 analyses present some key differences. In the frequentist models we find that lifetime victimization, hate crime, and noncriminal bias events had significant and positive relationship with anxiety, depression, and anger. Only hate crimes were significantly related to dissociation. The Bayesian results change based on which priors were implemented into the models. Ultimately, the results differ both across methodologies and within the Bayesian methodology depending on type of prior used. Several meaningful differences between the approaches emerge resulting in different interpretations of these results. Bayesian analyses serve as an additional tool for researchers that can be used to answer new and unique research questions that may be inaccessible by frequentist methods. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Inequalities in health are a prevalent feature of societies. And as societies, we condemn inequalities that are rooted in immutable circumstances such as gender, race, and parental background. Consequently, policy makers are interested in measuring and understanding the causes of health inequalities rooted in circumstances. However, identifying causal estimates of these relationships is very ambitious for reasons such as the presence of confounders or measurement error in the data. This thesis contributes to this ambitious endeavour by addressing these challenges in four chapters. In the first Chapter, I use 25 years of rich health information to describe three features of intergenerational health mobility in Germany. First, we describe the joint permanent health distribution of the parents and their children. A ten percentile increase in parental permanent health is associated with a 2.3 percentile increase in their child’s health. Second, a percentile point increase in permanent health ranks is associated with a 0.8% to 1.4% increase in permanent income for, both, children, and parents, respectively. Non-linearities in the association between permanent health and income create incentives to escape the bottom of the permanent health distribution. Third, upward mobility in permanent health varies with parental socio-economic status. In the second Chapter, we estimate the effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health in adulthood. Using the Socio-Economic Panel and the mental health measure based on the SF-12 questionnaire, we exploit a compulsory schooling law reform to identify the causal effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health. While the theoretical considerations are not clear, we do not find that the mother’s schooling has an effect on the mental health of the children. However, we find a positive effect on children’s physical health operating mainly through physical functioning. In addition, albeit with the absence of a reduced-form effect on mental health, we find evidence that the number of friends moderates the relationship between maternal schooling and their children’s mental health. In the third Chapter, against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. In the last Chapter of this thesis, we investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed – particularly women– in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are 35% more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.

Violence and GenderVol. 4, No. 4 Special FeatureFree AccessSelected Literature WatchPublished Online:1 Dec 2017https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2017.29013.litAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Firearm ViolenceCastillo-Carniglia A, Kagawa RMC, Webster DW, et al. (2017). Comprehensive background check policy and firearm background checks in three U.S. states. Inj Prev. [Epub ahead of print]; doi:10.1136/injuryprev-2017-042475.Cipriani G, Danti S, Carlesi C, Di Fiorino M. (2017). Armed and aging: Dementia and firearms do not mix! J Gerontol Soc Work. [Epub ahead of print]; doi:10.1080/01634372.2017.1376240.Díez C, Kurland RP, Rothman EF, et al. (2017). State intimate partner violence-related firearm laws and intimate partner homicide rates in the United States, 1991 to 2015. Ann Intern Med. 167, 536–543.Dillon KP, Bushman BJ. (2017). Effects of exposure to gun violence in movies on children's interest in real guns. JAMA Pediatr. [Epub ahead of print]; doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.2229.Meszaros J. (2017). Falling through the cracks: The decline of mental health care and firearm violence. J Ment Health. 26, 359–365.Peek-Asa C, Butcher B, Cavanaugh JE. (2017). Cost of hospitalization for firearm injuries by firearm type, intent, and payer in the United States. Inj Epidemiol. 4, 20.Resnick S, Smith RN, Beard JH, Holena D, et al. (2017). Firearm deaths in America: Can we learn from 462,000 lives lost? Ann Surg. 266, 432–440.Rosenberg M, Ranapurwala SI, Townes A, Bengtson AM. (2017). Do black lives matter in public health research and training? PLoS One. 12, e0185957.Simckes MS, Simonetti JA, Moreno MA, et al. (2017). Access to a loaded gun without adult permission and school-based bullying. J Adolesc Health. 61, 329–334.Smith RN, Seamon MJ, Kumar V, et al. (2017). Lasting impression of violence: Retained bullets and depressive symptoms. Injury. [Epub ahead of print]; doi:10.1016/j.injury.2017.08.057.Stroebe W, Leander NP, Kruglanski AW. (2017). The impact of the Orlando mass shooting on fear of victimization and gun-purchasing intentions: Not what one might expect. PLoS One. 12, e0182408.Hatred and ViolenceBenier K. (2017). The neighborhood context of hate crime: A comparison of violent and property offenses using rare events modeling. Violence Vict. 32, 584–608.Cichocka A, Dhont K, Makwana AP. (2017). On self-love and outgroup hate: Opposite effects of narcissism on prejudice via social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism. Eur J Pers. 31, 366–384.Danielson CM, Emmers-Sommer TM. (2017). “She stopped me from killing myself”: Bullied bloggers' coping behaviors and support sources. Health Commun. 32, 977–986.Gil-Borrelli CC, Martín-Ríos MD, Rodríguez-Arenas MÁ; en representación del Grupo de Investigación SIVIVO. (2017). Proposed action for the detection and care of victims of hate violence for health professionals. Med Clin (Barc). [Epub ahead of print]; doi:10.1016/j.medcli.2017.06.017.Valcore JL. (2017). Sexual orientation in state hate crime laws: Exploring social construction and criminal law. J Homosex. 1–24; doi: 10.1080/00918369.2017.1380992.White MH, Crandall CS. (2017). Freedom of racist speech: Ego and expressive threats. J Pers Soc Psychol. 113, 413–429.Wilkinson WW, Peters CS. (2017). Evaluations of antigay hate crimes and hate crime legislation: Independent and differentially predicted. J Homosex. 1–17; doi: 10.1080/00918369.2017.1364556.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 4Issue 4Dec 2017 InformationCopyright 2017, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:Selected Literature Watch.Violence and Gender.Dec 2017.152-152.http://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2017.29013.litPublished in Volume: 4 Issue 4: December 1, 2017Online Ahead of Print:November 13, 2017PDF download