Many people from ethnic minorities struggle to find culturally competent therapists who can truly understand their family dynamics and the issues that affect them in a wider cultural context. A part of this is being aware of intergenerational trauma, and how mental health issues can affect entire families, not just one individual.
This was made all too apparent in the new Apple TV series The Shrink Next Door, starring Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell. Based on a true story (and the subsequent podcast), Rudd plays the unscrupulous psychiatrist Ike Herschkopf who manipulates his (mainly Jewish) clients, using their money and connections to schmooze his way up the New York social ladder.
On first viewing it didn’t really appear to do our community any favours from a PR point of view. But both the series and podcast highlight the fact that Ike’s father was a survivor of the Holocaust, and also strongly hinted that this affected his son in such a way as to partly explain (but not condone) his eventual actions as an adult
Scientific evidence backs this up – in 1966, Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff, MD, and her colleagues recorded high rates of psychological distress among children of Holocaust survivors, and the concept of generational trauma was first recognised. Years later, a 1988 study, published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, found that grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were overrepresented by about 300% in psychiatric care referrals.
Intergenerational trauma is particularly prevalent among minorities who have experienced (and continue to experience) systematic exploitation, abuse, racism and poverty, where the trauma suffered by one generation gets passed down to the next. It’s still a relatively new field of study, meaning researchers have a lot to discover about its impact and how it presents in people who suffer from it. But there’s no doubt that it affects people in our community and more study is needed so that future generations don’t suffer from the trauma that was inflicted upon their ancestors.
