Many Black youth in the United States experience racial discrimination. One recent study of Black adolescents found that they reported an average of approximately five racial discrimination experiences per day. What is the impact of these experiences on the mental health of Black youth over time?
My colleagues and I addressed this question in a recent study. Nearly 900 Black youth from Georgia and Iowa completed surveys when they were 10.5 years old and again when they were 12.5, 15.5, and 19 years old. At each time point, youth reported on their experiences of racial discrimination over the past year, such as having someone say something insulting because of their race, being treated in a disrespectful way because of their race, or being excluded from an activity because of their race. They also reported on their depressive symptoms over the past year, such as feeling sad, feeling irritable, or feeling like nothing was fun. Our goal was to see how racial discrimination and youths' depressive symptoms were connected over time. Understanding these associations during adolescence is important because adolescence is a key period for the emergence of mental health difficulties.
We first examined differences in depressive symptoms between youth experiencing different levels of racial discrimination. For example, imagine two adolescents—Mary and John—who are both Black and 13 years old, but Mary's surveys indicate that she has experienced more racial discrimination over the past year than John. Do these differences also predict differences in depressive symptoms?
Our findings indicated that youth who experienced more racial discrimination (like Mary) had more depressive symptoms than youth who experienced less racial discrimination (like John). Strikingly, these differences emerged when we considered depressive symptoms at the same point in time and at the next survey 2-3 years later. In other words, adolescents who experienced more racial discrimination had more depressive symptoms in the short- and longer-term compared to adolescents experiencing less racial discrimination.
We built on these findings to test whether there were differences in depressive symptoms as youth experienced varying degrees of racial discrimination over time. Returning to our example, imagine that Mary generally experiences a moderate level of racial discrimination, but there are times when she experiences more racial discrimination and times when she experiences less discrimination. We can then examine whether Mary's depressive symptoms change depending on whether she is experiencing more or less racial discrimination relative to her own average. Our analyses testing this question showed that these types of within-person shifts in experiences of racial discrimination corresponded to shifts in depressive symptoms. Youth reported more depressive symptoms when they experienced more racial discrimination than usual, and fewer depressive symptoms when they experienced less racial discrimination than usual. Furthermore, these effects persisted over time: after experiencing more racial discrimination than they usually did, youth continued to report more depressive symptoms 2-3 years later. And, after experiencing less racial discrimination than they usually did, youth reported fewer depressive symptoms 2-3 years later.
Youths' age and gender did not make much difference in these results. We also saw that youths' depressive symptoms did not predict how much racial discrimination they experienced.
Racial discrimination is harmful to the mental health of Black adolescents. Youth experiencing more racial discrimination—whether that was relative to others or relative to their own average—reported more depressive symptoms at that point in time and more than two years later. These findings add to other work documenting the negative effects of racial discrimination on youths' health and well-being and underscore the need to eradicate racism and support Black youth in the face of racial discrimination.
For Further Reading
Lavner, J. A., Ong, M. L., Carter, S. E., Hart, A. R., & Beach, S. R. H. (2022). Racial discrimination predicts depressive symptoms throughout adolescence among Black youth. Developmental Psychology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0001456
Lavner, J. A., Hart, A. R., Carter, S. E., & Beach, S. R. H. (2022). Longitudinal effects of racial discrimination on depressive symptoms among Black youth: Between- and within-person effects. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 61(1),56–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2021.04.020
English, D., Lambert, S. F., & Ialongo, N. S. (2014). Longitudinal associations between experienced racial discrimination and depressive symptoms in African American adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 50(4), 1190–1196. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034703
Justin A. Lavner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia. He studies risk, resilience, and well-being among children and families from underserved and marginalized populations.
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