“That Was a State of Depression by Itself Dealing with Society”: Atmospheric racism, mental health, and the Black and African American faith community

Abstract

Despite increased societal focus on structural racism, and its negative impact on health, empirical research within mental health remains limited relative to the magnitude of the problem. The current study—situated within a community-engaged project with members of a predominantly Black and African American church in the northeastern US—collaboratively examined depressive experience, recovery, and the role of racism and racialized structures. This co-designed study featured individual interviews (N = 11), a focus group (N = 14), and stakeholder engagement. A form of qualitative, phenomenological analysis that situates psychological phenomena within their social structural contexts was utilized. Though a main focal point of the study was depressive and significantly distressing experience, participant narratives directed us more towards a world that was structured to deplete and deprive—from basic neighborhood conditions, to police brutality, to workplace discrimination, to pervasive racist stereotypes, to differential treatment by health and social services. Racism was thus considered as atmospheric, in the sense of permeating life itself—with social, affective, embodied, and temporal dimensions, alongside practical (e.g., livelihood, vocation, and care) and spatial (e.g., neighborhood, community, and work) ones. The major thematic subsections—world, body, time, community, and space—reflect this fundamental saturation of racism within lived reality. There are two, interrelated senses of structural racism implicated here: the structures of the world and their impact on the structural dimensions of life. This study on the atmospheric nature of racism provides a community-centered complement to existing literature on structural racism and health that often proceed from higher, more population level scales. This combined literature suggests placing ever-renewed emphasis on addressing the causes and conditions that make this kind of distorted world possible in the first place.