Can Trauma Pass On Genetically? Yes. What My Students Taught Me

Yesterday, students in my course (Immigration and Race: Inequality in Labor) presented their research projects. I am summarizing a stunning project by two psychology students who also work in the UIUC Brain and Cognitive Development Lab.

“Mental Illness Within the Slave Population: Early History to Present Day” showed that slaves in the early 1800s were “treated” for mental illness. Manifestations of illness included slaves talking back to masters all the way up to engaging in rebellious behaviors. 

The shocking part was medicine’s role.

One school of scientific thought believed that black people have less oxygen in their blood than whites—and this caused some degree of mental infirmity. 

Psychiatrists of the time also thought the best way to treat these “mentally ill” slaves was whipping.

The students then turned to studies of Holocaust survivors. 

Almost all exhibited PTSD, not only behaviorally, but hormonally. A stress hormone created in the amygdala (inner core of the bran) was more than normal: the amygdala also remained in “overdrive.”

The real stunner is evidence that an abnormal number of descendants of Holocaust survivors have high stress hormones that come from their amygdala. Researchers believe that this is evidence of—and here, I use my students’ words— “multi-generational oppression.”

They concluded that the higher rates of mental illnesses among African-Americans are quite possibly a genetic legacy of several generations of slavery (called by Swiss researchers Post Traumatic Slave Disorder).