Young adults who experience discrimination about their bodies, race, age, or sex have a greater risk of dealing with mental health problems than those who do not, a new study has found.
Encountering discrimination — especially racism — has long been associated with negative effects on overall well-being, such as higher levels of stress, poor cognitive function, anxiety, depression, and substance use, previous studies have found.
Those who faced discrimination frequently — at least a few times per month —were around 25% more likely to be diagnosed with a mental disorder and twice as likely to develop severe psychological distress than people who didn’t experience discrimination or did less often, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
Having dealt with any degree of discrimination was linked with a 26% higher risk for having poor overall health, according to the participants’ responses. Often experiencing discrimination wasn’t strongly associated with binge drinking but was linked with more use of drugs such as amphetamines, marijuana, tranquilizers, barbiturates, or cocaine in the last year without a doctor’s prescription.
Read more at CNN.com.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.