Ethnicity Trauma Ethnicity and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

It is a natural human response to suffer long-term emotional consequences from exposure to a traumatic event or sustained traumatic experiences. However, the incarnations of these long-term consequences exist on a widely variant spectrum. Among the wide array of factors that might be used to predict these consequences, ethnicity is among the most highly debated. So shows the article by Perilla et al. (2002), which addresses the concepts of differential exposure and differential vulnerability in illuminating the subject.

Perilla et al. indicate that one possible explanation for differing levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) according to ethnicity is the relationship between ethnicity and other sociological factors that might contribute to a comparatively more severe experience within the scope of a similar trauma. Particularly, the authors examine Hurricane Andrew's effects on a wide variance of populations in achieving a definition of differential exposure. They report...

The poor, the less educated, and ethnic minorities are generally more likely to live in undesirable, at-risk areas and to reside in less safe and more vulnerable homes." (Perilla et al., p. 23)
This is distinct, they note, from differential vulnerability, which takes a broader view on the experience of ethnic minorities. This suggests that the larger set of difficulties experienced by these groups in the context of racially imbalanced cultures, societies and economies creates a generally more vulnerable psyche that when exposed to trauma is likelier to demonstrate more persistent cognitive dissonance. (Perilla et al., p. 23)

In either instance, the manner in which PTSD is experienced is couched not just in the ethnicity itself but in what is implicated by the ethnicity in the context of a culture, economy and society. That is to say that any number of differences manifested in…