Kim and colleagues found that prenatal exposure to discrimination and violence during the apartheid regime in South Africa predicted mental health problems among children born to younger mothers and youngsters whose households were particularly stressful. The Journal Of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Their challenge has been proving the exact ways those traumas are transmitted - and how they affect a person’s mental health and physical well-being today.Īnd with historical racism hanging over the discipline of anthropology, asks Kim, “What does it look like for us to apply these lessons to our own discipline … to transform science that was once contributing to a very disgusting scientific practice?” Researchers around the world already know there is an association. This work, along with the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which studies how our behavior and environment can affect gene expression, is attempting to uncover the most basic ways these types of stressors persist. Scholars in fields from the social sciences to medicine are increasingly interested in how anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress manifest from one generation to the next, years after a conflict’s formal conclusion. intergenerational trauma - that is uncovering how large-scale trauma from atrocities like theĪnd mass starvation in Ukraine has a ripple effect in families decades later. Kim’s work is the latest contribution to a Today, Kim is a recently hired assistant professor of biological anthropology at UC Berkeley who hopes his ever-expanding list of research projects will inspire mental health interventions and improve people’s lives - maybe even save them. His mind teemed with questions: How would a Black South African mother’s trauma from apartheid three decades earlier shape the life of her child? How might racism, systemic oppression and other afflictions affect the ways a person’s body and brain respond to stress, disease and psychological disorders? And what can our individual stories teach us about mental illness? It was exciting work with possible international implications, the type of big-picture research puzzle he had long dreamed of solving. It was 2017, and Kim, at the time a Northwestern University biological anthropology graduate student, was researching how a woman’s stress while pregnant can affect the mental health of her child. (Unsplash photo by Gregory Fullard)Īndrew Kim’s mind raced as he entered the sprawling South African hospital. Researchers are working to understand how widespread trauma, like that of South African apartheid, ripples from one generation to the next.

Intergenerational trauma research