George Floyd video adds to trauma: 'When is the last time you saw a white person killed online?'

Analysis: African Americans face harmful mental health effects every time high-profile incidents of racism and police brutality go viral.

Now, as a pandemic rages, African Americans in communities across the country disproportionally devastated by COVID-19 are forced to bear witness to more black deaths.

Recent deaths of individuals of color and the deleterious impact of COVID-19 on communities of color stems all the way from 1776," said Alisha Moreland-Capuia, executive director of Oregon Health & Science University's Avel Gordly Center for Healing, which focuses on culturally sensitive care for the African American community. .

Racism is associated with a host of psychological consequences, including depression, anxiety, and other serious, and sometimes debilitating mental conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorders, mental health experts say.

High-profile incidents of racism and police brutality, especially when accompanied by viral videos, are triggering for people of color who see how little changes in their aftermath.

"Racism is traumatic for people of color," said Monnica Williams, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who studies African American mental health. "Everything that you have to carry around anyway as a black person in America, to add onto it having to watch people in your community who've done nothing killed at the hands of people in power who will probably suffer few, if any, consequences.

"I can only describe the continued viewing of racial violence, torture, murder and disregard for the humanity of black bodies as repetitive trauma," said Danielle Jackson, a psychiatry resident and board member of the American Psychiatric Association's Caucus of Black Psychiatrists.

Police kill more than 300 black Americans – at least a quarter unarmed – each year in the U.S., according to a 2018 study in The Lancet, which found these killings have spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans not directly affected.

Some mental health experts argue the explosive footage that accompanies many of these violent deaths are vital to raising public consciousness, even if they are disturbing. .

"It powerfully shapes our discourse, much like the images of African American youth in the South who were being sprayed with powerful water hoses and bitten by police dogs when they protested during the Civil Rights Movement," said Brian Smedley, chief of psychology in the public interest at the American Psychological Association

& if the display of Black people in pain was enough to end racism, haven't we at long last seen enough

People of color are witnessing these brutal deaths amid a global pandemic that is hitting African American and Latino communities especially hard

Also, people of color are more likely than white adults to report significant stressors in their life as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, including getting coronavirus (71% vs. 59%, respectively), basic needs (61% vs. 47%), and access to health care services (59% vs. 46%), according to the American Psychological Association's "Stress in America" report published in May

"People of color already carry the burden of structural racism in our history and in our bodies," Montenegro said. "COVID has highlighted how power, privilege, and access to means and resources are distributed disproportionately."

Arline Geronimus, a professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan, uses the term "weathering" to describe the way chronic stressors – which can include interpersonal microaggressions and institutionalized racism – erode bodies. These erosions can lead to chronic conditions among people of color which, Smedley said, make them more vulnerable to COVID-19

Approximately 30% of African American adults with mental illness get treatment each year, below the U.S

average of 43%, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Many African Americans mistrust the health system, and socioeconomic factors can limit access to treatment

But even mental health professionals recognize there are limits to what the mental health system can do in the face of institutionalized racism. Williams said she's tired of talking about how to cope. 

"If we do not treat, manage, and effectively contain the disease of racism, the emotional and psychological toll will not only continue to kill black people, it will consume us all."

Dastagir is a recipient of a Rosalynn Carter fellowship for mental health journalism