Gender, Ethnicity and Depression: Intersectionality in Mental Health Research with African American Women

This review synthesizes the current knowledge regarding African American women and depression. After highlighting major findings related to the epidemiology, etiology, symptomatology and treatment, we will discuss the gaps in our understanding of these factors specific to African American women. We will argue that filling in these gaps will require a theoretical framework that takes into account the intersection of race and gender. We will present an empirically defined heuristic for studying mental illness among African American women, in terms of both experiences and outcomes

Buried hatchets, marked locations: Forgiveness, everyday racial discrimination, and African American men’s depressive symptomatology.

Everyday racial discrimination (ERD) is linked to pronounced depressive symptomatology among African-American men. Yet, many African-American men do not experience depressive symptoms following ERD exposure often because they employ positive coping strategies that offset its effects. Granting forgiveness is one coping strategy associated with less depression. However, extant findings about the mental health benefits of forgiveness are somewhat mixed and pay scarce attention to offenses which are fleeting, historically rooted, and committed outside of close personal relationships. Evidence further suggest age-related differences in forgiveness, ERD exposure, and depressive symptoms. We explore the extent to which three strategies of granting forgiveness of ERD—letting go of negative emotion (negative release), embracing positive emotion (positive embrace), or combining both (combined)— are associated with less depressive symptomatology in 674 African-American men (ages 18-79). Building on past findings, we also test whether these forgiveness strategies moderate the ERD-depressive symptoms relationship for men in different age groups (18-25, 26-39, 40). Higher combined and negative release forgiveness were directly related to lower depressive symptoms among 18-25 year-olds. We also detected a less pronounced positive relationship between ERD and depressive symptoms among men reporting high levels of combined (18-25 and 26-39 groups) and negative release (26-39 and 40+ groups) forgiveness. We observed a more pronounced positive ERD-depressive symptoms relationship among 18-25 and 26-39 year-olds reporting lower forgiveness. When faced with frequent ERD, younger African-American men may have the most difficult time burying hatchets without marking their location but experience more positive mental health benefits when they do

An Examination of the African American Experience of Everyday Discrimination and Symptoms of Psychological Distress

Current theoretical models suggest that the most potent and impacting discrimination experienced by African Americans in the post Jim Crow era are subtle and unconscious forms of discrimination that are experienced on a daily basis. This study investigates the relationship between perceived everyday discrimination and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Further, we examine gender as a moderator of this relationship. Data come from the 1995 Detroit Area Study data with 570 African American respondents. Results indicate that perceived discrimination is directly related to both symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gender moderates the relationship between discrimination and anxiety symptoms, but not discrimination and depressive symptoms. Overall, different patterns of relationships were apparent for men and women

The Color and Texture of Hope: Some Preliminary Findings and Implications for Hope Theory and Counseling Among Diverse Racial/Ethnic Groups

For decades, researchers have been interested in identifying individual-differences variables that are linked to adjustment. One variable, which is believed not only to represent an important individual-differences predictor of a range of adaptive outcomes but also to have important implications for counseling students, is hope (Synder, 1995)