Perceived Racial Treatment and Mental Health Across Black and White Generational Cohorts

Racial discrimination has been found to be deleterious to Black mental health. However, the manifestation and experience of perceived racial discrimination may have changed over time, affecting those who were socialized in different eras differently. Furthermore, the way that white Americans understand and internalize racial discrimination against white people has expanded in the years since the Civil Rights era. These generational shifts may contribute to recent overall trends in mental health outcome prevalence, mental healthcare treatment seeking behavior, and deaths of despair across generations and between racial groups. In this study, I examined how perceived racial treatment relates to subjective and objective mental health indicators among non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white adults across four generational cohorts. Preliminary results reveal that among both Black and white adults, Generation X experiences significantly higher odds of poor mental health outcomes compared to other generational cohorts. Among Black adults, for only Generation X did perceived poor racial treatment relate to poor mental health outcomes. However, among white adults, perceived worse racial treatment compared to other races was associated with worse subjective mental health outcomes for all generations. Additionally, white adults in Generation X saw an increased predicted probability of poor subjective mental health outcomes if they perceived they were treated better than other races. Better perceived treatment was also associated with higher odds of diagnosed depression across all generational cohorts among white adults.