![]() Joy DeGruy: “PTSS describes a set of behaviors, beliefs and actions associated with or, related to multi-generational trauma experienced by African Americans that may be inclusive of but not limited to undiagnosed and untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in enslaved Africans.” PTSS is an explanatory theory that makes maladaptive behaviors that originated as survival strategies pass down through generations of Black Americans even if these traits are out of context. The phenomena I’m describing has been coined post-traumatic slave syndrome by Dr. In other words, it becomes advantageous to be constantly hyper-aware of your surroundings, or to mistrust those around you. This affects their epigenome in a way that signals a stress response that becomes adaptive to their lives as enslaved people. What this resulted in was a sizable population of children with unpredictable and unreliable periods of care throughout their childhoods. The constant shifting and tearing of familial and kinship ties led to the inevitable demise of stability and the possibility of thorough and prolonged childhood nurturing. ![]() Brian Dias at the USC Keck School of Medicine suggests that both epigenetic and social inheritance are modes of continuing generational trauma: “table social environments allow for nurturing to occur, and that buffers future generations from the stressors that previous generations might have endured.”ĭue to the frequency of slave trade, which resulted in the separation of mothers from their children, husbands from wives, sisters from their brothers, this “stable social environment” never existed for the enslaved. ![]() The social and psychological impact of enslavement persists across generations and still affects the African American personality in that contemporary Black Americans have inherited an extensive list of habits and behaviors from the era of slavery. This provides evidence to the growing field of epigenetics that trauma is, in fact, inheritable through epigenetic modifications.Įnslavement and Its Biological Impact on African American Communities A 2013 study done on mice in labs demonstrated that when a parent is taught to fear a certain scent, their offspring, without any prior exposure to their parent’s stressor, also intrinsically fears that scent. However, new discoveries in the field of epigenetics are beginning to suggest that not only do survivors experience psychological issues, but their offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception. Survivors of atrocities and trauma have been shown to experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash The direct cause for this difference is unknown, but it can possibly be attributed to single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or subtle variations in each person’s genome. ![]() Epigenetic modifications can result from old age, diseases, or environmental factors.Įnvironmental factors include external stressors or traumatic experiences, which may result in genetic responses that either put one at a higher risk for developing disorders or make one more resilient to stressors. This, in turn, effects the genes expressed without changing any specific gene sequences– a change in phenotype without a change in genotype. Series of DNA methylations affect the ways in which genes can be transcribed and translated from the genome, rendering certain parts of the genome readable while others are unreadable.ĭNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism in which a methyl group (-CH 3) is covalently added to the 5-carbon on a cytosine ring in a DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression without alterations to DNA sequences. Photo by Guillaume Issaly on Unsplash (rights-free)Ī developing field of biological study, epigenetics, has begun to shed light on the effect of trauma on the human genome.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |