Department Lunch Talk! Dr. Andrew Wooyoung Kim
On March 11th @ 12pm, Dr. Andrew Wooyoung Kim will give a virtual talk on “Psychological legacies of intergenerational trauma under South African apartheid: Maternal prenatal stress, infant birth outcomes, and adolescent psychiatric morbidity in Soweto, South Africa.”
South Africa’s rates of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa, yet access to mental health treatment is poor: only 27% of patients living with severe mental illness are expected to receive treatment. The current state of public mental health in South Africa is foregrounded by a long and recent history of institutionalized White supremacist policies implemented during the Apartheid regime (c. 1948-1994). Since South Africa’s democratic transition, nationalist ideologies promoting aspirations for unity, equality, and freedom in the new “rainbow nation” have continuously been met with chronicities of anti-black violence, misogynoir, and structural violence, all of which are known risk factors for psychiatric disorders. These legacies of white supremacist apartheid policies underpin the dramatic inequities seen in mental health disparities. In addition to these ongoing societal effects, there is growing evidence that the stressors of the past could have lingering biological effects that continue to influence and mental health across the lifecourse.
Growing evidence from the fetal origins of health and disease framework shows that past stress and trauma exposures, particularly those that occur during early development, can durably alter the development and function of various stress regulatory mechanisms in humans. These long-term impacts could shape the gestational environment experienced by the next generation, thereby influencing grandoffspring development. Thus, maternal exposures during gestation may not only affect their developing children but also affect the health and biology of subsequent generations – thus describing a possible intergenerational mechanism for stress transmission. Drawing from data from a 30-year multigenerational birth cohort study based in Soweto and 18 months of ethnographic research with mental health patients, professionals and NGOs in South Africa, this talk examines the biocultural transmission of embodied trauma from apartheid and its impacts on human biology and mental health in subsequent generations among families living in Soweto, South Africa. I describe the applications of this research to recent work on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Johannesburg and new research in this area.
Dr. Andrew Wooyoung Kim is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Health & Chester M. Pierce Division of Global Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, as well as an Honorary Lecturer, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand.