Nobel Conference speaker explores racism and mental health links

Sep. 29—A speaker at Gustavus Adolphus College's Nobel Conference told an audience that Black, Indigenous and people of color experience racial discrimination between once a week to five times a day on average.

"That can take a toll on young people's lives. It might actually add up as a psychological burden over time," said Priscilla Lui, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University.

"Everyday discrimination might be more insidious and, sometimes, we discount their total effects on young people's mental health," she said.

The 58th annual conference's topic, "Mental Health (In)Equity and Young People," hosted seven leading experts in psychology and other health-related fields all working in higher education to discuss the challenges faced by marginalized communities and the effects it has on their mental health.

Lisa Heldke, director of the conference, said the topic was chosen based on the knowledge that the mental health of young adults is an important cause of scientific and ethical concern, even before the COVID-19 pandemic took its toll.

The conference speakers were also carefully chosen.

"It was really important to the organizers that the representatives be able to speak, to some extent, from the vantage point of young people," she said. "So our speakers are a little bit younger than many years because that's who's doing the research on these topics."

Lui happened to be one of them.

Her presentation, "Scientific Understanding of Racism and Discrimination Experiences: A Path Toward Mental Health Equity," investigated how systemic racism and how both direct and indirect experiences with racial discrimination cause health disparities among young Black, Indigenous and people of color.

Lui gave real-world examples of how racism affects youth by showing two scenarios of it occurring through a virtual reality simulation. The participants shown in the simulation were part of a study to determine how experiencing such scenarios make BIPOC feel afterward.

The first simulation showed an example of overt discrimination while the second showed an example of microaggressions.

Lui said they had found that the participants who endured discriminatory conditions showed higher levels of stress and negative emotions opposed to the control group, which were also put through stressful conversations but ones unrelated to race, such as finances and academics.

Jenesis Tompkins, senior psychology major at Gustavus, said she loved Lui's presentation and was a big fan of the simulations.

"Oh my goodness, it was very great, very dynamic. It really had me engaged the whole time," she said. "I've never seen VR used in that way, so I thought that was super unique."

Lui, happy with the feedback, said she hopes the audience took several things away from her presentation.

Among them is to avoid dismissing the everyday discriminatory experiences of marginalized communities.

"We have evidence using experimental designs that these experiences, as benign as people might think they are, do have immediate and potentially delayed effects on mental health statuses as well as maladaptive behaviors," she said. "I think what's important is we need to start thinking about not only the risk factors and vulnerabilities that contribute to health disparities and minority mental health issues, but certainly protective factors as well."

Lui's presentation was followed by a moderated panel discussion of all seven conference speakers.

Both Lui's presentation and the panel discussion were live-streamed and will be archived on Gustavus' website: https://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/archive/.

The conference continues on Thursday.