Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health

Highlights

• Historical trauma is a promising but inadequately conceptualized area of research.

• A wide variety of research shows the short- and long-term health impact of trauma.

• Historical trauma functions a public narrative for particular groups or communities.

• We offer a model of historical trauma as present-day narrative that impacts health.

• Historical trauma narratives are a source of present-day distress and resilience.

Abstract

Theories of historical trauma increasingly appear in the literature on individual and community health, especially in relation to racial and ethnic minority populations and groups that experience significant health disparities. As a consequence of this rapid growth, the literature on historical trauma comprises disparate terminology and research approaches. This critical review integrates this literature in order to specify theoretical mechanisms that explain how historical trauma influences the health of individuals and communities. We argue that historical trauma functions as a public narrative for particular groups or communities that connects present-day experiences and circumstances to the trauma so as to influence health. Treating historical trauma as a public narrative shifts the research discourse away from an exclusive search for past causal variables that influence health to identifying how present-day experiences, their corresponding narratives, and their health impacts are connected to public narratives of historical trauma for a particular group or community. We discuss how the connection between historical trauma and present-day experiences, related narratives, and health impacts may function as a source of present-day distress as well as resilience.

Introduction

Historical trauma refers to a complex and collective trauma experienced over time and across generations by a group of people who share an identity, affiliation, or circumstance (Brave Heart and DeBruyn, 1998, Crawford, 2013, Evans-Campbell, 2008, Gone, 2013). Although historical trauma was originally introduced to describe the experience of children of Holocaust survivors (Kellermann, 2001a), in the past two decades, the term has been applied to numerous colonized indigenous groups throughout the world, as well as African Americans, Armenian refugees, Japanese American survivors of internment camps, Swedish immigrant children whose parents were torture victims, Palestinian youth, the people of Cyprus, Belgians, Cambodians, Israelis, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Russians, and many other cultural groups and communities that share a history of oppression, victimization, or massive group trauma exposure (Baker and Gippenreiter, 1998, Campbell and Evans-Campbell, 2011, Daud et al., 2005, Karenian et al., 2011, Sotero, 2006, Wexler et al., 2009). Scholars from various disciplines have described the generational aspect of historical trauma as transgenerational, intergenerational, multi-generational, or cross-generational (Bar-On et al., 1998, Kellermann, 2001b), and have introduced concepts, such as soul wound (Duran, 2006, Duran and Duran, 1995) or Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome (Leary, 2005), to capture the collective experience of trauma by specific cultural groups across generations.

Despite the multitude of terms, historical trauma can be understood as consisting of three primary elements: a “trauma” or wounding; the trauma is shared by a group of people, rather than an individually experienced; the trauma spans multiple generations, such that contemporary members of the affected group may experience trauma-related symptoms without having been present for the past traumatizing event(s). It is distinct from intergenerational trauma in that intergenerational trauma refers to the specific experience of trauma across familial generations, but does not necessarily imply a shared group trauma. Similarly, a collective trauma may not have the generational or historical aspect, though over time may develop into historical trauma.

The widespread interest in historical trauma by scholars across many disciplines presents two unique challenges for this new and rapidly growing area: 1) how to make sense of a diverse empirical literature, and 2) how to integrate that literature with theory so as to advance scientific inquiry. In this critical review and integration, we address these challenges by providing a conceptual framework for understanding the empirical literature on historical trauma, and then specify a theoretical model based on that framework that explains how historical trauma affects present-day health among individuals and communities.