- Images and video of
police brutality during protests are being widely disseminated on social media as people continue to protest the death of George Floyd. - These images can cause trauma, especially for black people who have witnessed or experienced racist events in their own lives, experts say.
- Even for those who haven't experienced police brutality, these images can lead to trauma because they can remind a person of someone in their life or expose them to the moment a person was killed or violently injured.
Protesters around the country are taking to the streets to bring light to systemic racism after 46 year-old George Floyd died while pinned under the knees of three police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota last week.
The protests, which are happening across the US, are also being widely shown on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Some videos and photos depict police throwing tear gas at protesters, shooting them with rubber bullets, driving cruisers into crowds, and throwing protesters to the ground. Other videos show the police kneeling on Floyd's neck.
Though this imagery is often intended to shine light on racism and bolster efforts in fighting it, the constant barrage of content can also cause or reinforce trauma, especially for black people, according to experts.
"Traditionally, when we think about trauma, when we think about disorders like, say,
How imagery of violence against black people reinforces existing trauma
For black people, simply existing appears to lead to chronic stress.
In a 2009 study, researchers found chronic stress was a common factor in black women who had high blood pressure. The majority of study subjects said racism was one of the biggest and most consistent stressors in their lives.
A 2019 study found that black women in California who gave birth in areas where police killed unarmed black people were more likely to have babies with lower birth weights.
"There is something specific to police killings of unarmed blacks that are perceived as unjustified, that generates stress, which then translates to lower birth weights," the study's author Joscha Legewie previously told Insider.
When images and videos that depict those stressors are constantly at the forefront, then, that can remind black people of the discrimination they deal with.
"When you see someone on a video being shot and brutalized by police, you think to yourself, 'That could be me.' Or if not that, that it could be someone you love. So you feel it very deeply because it's happening to a member of your community, someone who looks like you," Williams said.
You can experience trauma from these images even if you haven't personally experienced police brutality
Even if a person has never experienced police brutality or gun violence themselves, seeing persistent images of those events can still lead to a trauma response, Burgandy Holiday, a Philadelphia-based psychotherapist, told Insider.
Holiday offered the personal example from her childhood, in which she watch the movie "Terminator 2," and witnessed a robot "going down in this hot molten steel, and he's melting and he is giving himself, he is surrendering himself...so the rise of the machines doesn't occur," she said.
Holiday cried during that scene because she could relate to its sentiments of sacrifice and love.
"What really matters is we see something in that we can reflect back into our lives. So that thing over there is alive, or that person over there is male just like me, or I have a son who's that age...When we can find some human thread that we can move between the two of us for similarity, then we can kind of connect," Holiday said, and that connection can make a person feel like they're linked to the situation they're watching back in a video or photo.
In the case of people at home seeing videos of police brutality, they connect those events to things that could happen to the people in their lives, or to a universal understanding of death and dying. As a result, they may feel scared, helpless, angry, or depressed, which Holiday said can all be responsive feelings to trauma.
The intensity of the trauma depends on a person's lived experience
Trauma exists on a scale, and people who have experienced traumatic event firsthand and then see images of similar events may have a more intense response since they can directly relate to the situation that's been depicted, according to Ken Yeager, the director of the Stress, Trauma and Resilience (STAR) Program at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
"It is so much more than what you see. It's what is experienced as a population," Yeager said.
Someone who had experienced police brutality firsthand, then, may exhibit more signs of trauma than someone who has never had that experience. Those trauma signs include relentless fear, avoiding people and places that could trigger the initial trauma, feeling detached from others, and feeling like no one can be trusted.
Generational trauma can also play a role.
Holiday said older black people share stories of racism and police brutality as a way to prepare the younger generations for what they should expect and do to survive. Even if a woman hasn't experienced those situations herself, her grandmother's stories about them, and the eventual passing of that story to her own child, can lead to deep-rooted generational trauma.
"There's an intergenerational transaction that happens for people of color people who are oppressed and we teach one another, for better or for worse. So this isn't new. This isn't a story that I just learned about," Holiday said. "And that leads to the trauma, the internal trauma that we experience from watching someone else die the way that we have."
Imagery-based trauma can have lasting health effects
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most severe form of trauma and is considered a clinical mental health diagnosis, Yeager said.
But a person doesn't have to be diagnosed with PTSD for their trauma to negatively impact their health.
Black Lives Matter activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham previously told PBS that watching videos of Tamir Rice and Philando Castille being killed triggered a physical response.
"I hadn't had nightmares about Ferguson and tear gas or protests for a long time, but they came back when I saw those videos," she said. "I saw the Tamir Rice video while sitting in the parking lot next to the park where he was killed. In hindsight, did I need to feel that pain watching the video in order to fully absorb what clearly was a tragedy? No. So why did I? Pressure."
According to Holiday, consistent unaddressed trauma, whether from imagery, racism, or both, can increase the risk of health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and weight issues.
When cortisol is released due to stress, it regulates the body's blood sugar, memory formation ability, and blood pressure. But repeated stressors can cause too much cortisol to release, and put the body's systems that it typically helps out of whack, Holiday said.
"If my body has been kind of [buckling] under the stress of high cortisol, how does that impact my genetic development? How does that impact my offspring? At some point, trauma starts to become a part of the genetic system," Holiday said.
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