Figure 1 - uploaded by Laurence J. Kirmayer
Content may be subject to copyright.
Transgenerational Transmission of Historical Trauma The diagram depicts some of the hypothetical pathways through which the effects of trauma and loss may be transmitted across generations through processes at multiple levels, including: epigenetic alterations of stress response; changes in individuals' psychological well-being, self-esteem, and self-efficacy; family functioning; community integrity and cultural identity; and the continuity of identity and collective efficacy of whole nations or peoples. (Adapted from Kirmayer et al., 2007).
Source publication
Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of di...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... potential pathways are complex. As outlined in Figure 1, intergenerational transmission may occur at many levels, including: interpersonally, through altered parenting; within families, which may be disrupted by loss of members or exposure to stressors like domestic violence; at the level of the community, when many Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (3) individuals and families are impacted by disturbances of social networks and experiences of safety and solidarity that affect health; and at the level of nation, where the suppression of culture and the disruption of family and community threaten the continuity of whole peoples. Additionally, recent work identifying epigenetic processes in stress and trauma transmission point toward biological levels (McGowan, et al., 2009). Although proponents of historical trauma have been quick to seize on this postulated mechanism of transmission ( Walters et al., 2011), the temptation to participate in fashionable forms of biological reductionism (Kirmayer & Gold, 2012) may not serve the emancipatory goals of Indigenous decolonization (Prussing, 2014). Moreover, there is no reason to assume that epi- genetic mechanisms-which appear to be reversible with appropriate life experi- ences-would not operate in service to intergenerational resilience as much as to intergenerational trauma. Finally, while postulated biological mechanisms are The diagram depicts some of the hypothetical pathways through which the effects of trauma and loss may be transmitted across generations through processes at multiple levels, including: epi- genetic alterations of stress response; changes in individuals' psychological well-being, self-esteem, and self-efficacy; family functioning; community integrity and cultural identity; and the continuity of identity and collective efficacy of whole nations or peoples. (Adapted from ...
Similar publications
We examine the historical relationship between humans and wolves as illustrated through stories of North American Indigenous Peoples, especially the Great Plains and Intermountain West, exemplified by Cheyenne, Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee, and Shoshone peoples. Indigenous stories have not been employed in scholarly examinations of the origins of ‘dog...
Citations
... Indigenous theories of holistic health align well with this framework; for example [30], found that cultural continuity-maintaining community values, practices, and social support systems-serves as a protective factor against youth suicide. Further, Indigenous resilience emphasizes that wellness arises from social relationships, collective identities, and traditional practices [31,32] and community-engaged research across many different AIAN populations has often yielded strengths-based, multi-level, and upstream suicide prevention initiatives [33]. Building from the intersecting lenses of public health and AIAN research and theory, this study highlights two significant, often overlooked, aspects of universal suicide prevention: building Communities of Practice (CoP) that include people in both community and institutional support roles, and selfefficacy to take upstream action for suicide prevention, including actions for mental health wellness promotion as well as prevention or reduction of suicide risk. ...
Background
Suicide is a serious and growing health inequity for Alaska Native (AN) youth (ages 15–24), who experience suicide rates significantly higher than the general U.S. youth population. In under-served, remote AN communities, building on existing local and cultural resources can increase uptake of prevention behaviors like lethal means reduction, interpersonal support, and postvention by family members, workers and community members, which can be important for preventing suicide in places where mental health services are sparce. This study expands the variables we hypothesize as important for reducing suicide risk and supporting mental wellness. These variables are: (1) perceived suicide prevention self-efficacy, (2) perceived wellness self-efficacy, and (3) developing a ‘community of practice’ (CoP) for prevention/wellness work.
Method
With a convenience sample (N = 398) of participants (ages 15+) in five remote AN communities, this study characterizes respondents’ social roles: institutional role if they have a job that includes suicide prevention (e.g. teachers, community health workers) and community role if their primary role is based on family or community positioning (e.g. Elder, parent). The cross-sectional analysis then explores the relationship between respondents’ wellness and prevention self-efficacy and CoP as predictors of their self-reported suicide prevention and wellness promotion behaviors: (1) working together with others (e.g. community initiatives), (2) offering interpersonal support to someone (3), reducing access to lethal means, and (4) reducing suicide risk for others after a suicide death in the community.
Results
Community and institutional roles are vital, and analyses detected distinct patterns linking our dependent variables to different preventative behaviors. Findings associated wellness self-efficacy and CoP (but not prevention self-efficacy) with “working together” behaviors, wellness and prevention self-efficacy (but not CoP) with interpersonal supportive behaviors; both prevention self-efficacy and CoP with higher postvention behaviors. Only prevention self-efficacy was associated with lethal means reduction.
Conclusions
The study widens the scope of suicide prevention. Promising approaches to suicide prevention in rural low-resourced communities include: (1) engaging people in community and institutional roles (2), developing communities of practice for suicide prevention among different sectors of a community, and (3) broadening the scope of suicide prevention to include wellness promotion as well as suicide prevention.
... 4 Through historical oppression, communities develop profound, complex, and collective psychological trauma. 5 This stands in the way of forgiveness, as it prevents the self-management of other emotions such as shame and self-doubt. 6 Therefore, the success of peacebuilding policies is incumbent on helping communities make sense of their pain and sort out emotions which they have been forced to hide away in fear, shame, or denial. ...
In peacebuilding discussions, the reconciliatory potential of film is often brushed aside as merely cultural. This paper challenges this view using two examples from Moroccan cinema: Tarik El Idrissi’s Rif 1958-59: Breaking The Silence (2015) and Hicham Lasri’s They are the Dogs (2013). In the 20th century, Morocco was the site of severe political violence, which was followed by a questionable reconciliation process that overlooked the importance of collective healing. Failing to properly address the trauma of communities after conflict, current peacebuilding policies remain remote from everyday life. This limits their effectiveness, as people’s unprocessed feelings stand in the way. Drawing on semiotics and psychoanalysis, this paper argues that films boost collective healing by engaging the viewer in a process of seeing. This engenders a visceral language through which survivors and witnesses of violence can make sense of their trauma. By processing trauma-related feelings, conflict-affected populations can better interact with the complex peacebuilding policies, which promises better future realities.
... Similarly, the negative mental health implications of historical victimization have been highlighted in studies on Indigenous communities, which have shown that historical trauma and grief over related losses are related to symptoms of anxiety and depression as well as feelings of anger and avoidance (Brave Heart, 2003;Whitbeck et al., 2004). These studies have also shown that ongoing marginalization and lack of recognition continue to negatively impact on mental health among Indigenous people (Kirmayer, Gone, & Moses, 2014). Moreover, a strong ethnic identity does not necessarily protect one from racial discrimination and may even exacerbate the psychological effects of such discrimination, as those who strongly identify with their ethnicity may be more sensitive to ethnicity-based rejection and discrimination (Yip et al., 2019;Yoo & Lee, 2005). ...
High ethnic identification is known to support well‐being. In the context of historical trauma, however, a sense of belonging to a persecuted community can contribute to social curse processes. This study explores the relationship between ethnic identity and mental distress among second‐ and third‐generation Ingrian women with a family history of displacement and ethnic persecution. It analyses the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma by investigating whether mothers' stronger ethnic identities contribute to daughters' greater mental distress, and whether this relationship is more pronounced in mother‐daughter pairs where a mother knows more than her daughter about the family's traumatic past. We analyse dyadic data from 94 mothers (i.e., second generation, M age = 64.9 years, SD = 9.8) and 94 daughters (i.e., third generation, M age = 36.8 years, SD = 12.2) using the actor‐partner interdependence model and the structural equation modelling framework. We find a positive relationship between a mother's ethnic identity and both her own mental distress and that of her daughter, a relationship intensified when a mother knows more than her daughter about the family's traumatic past. Our findings demonstrate the intergenerational carryover of collective victimisation. They also suggest that knowledge of past events can hinder intergenerational social curse processes and the transmission of historical trauma.
... Similarly for the retired elderly, some may select MAiD, but non-voluntary euthanasia in some European cases exist (Bilsen et al., 2009;Heide et al., 2007) and in 2006, the Royal Dutch Medical Association had proposed that simply being over 70 and weary of life could be seen as a legitimate basis for requesting euthanasia (Sheldon, 2005). Finally, indigenous communities in Canda may also be viewed as good candidates as they are particularly marginalized (Allan & Smylie, 2015;Kirmayer et al., 2014;Smye et al., 2023), with high rates of substance abuse (Firestone et al., 2015), suicide (Kumar & Tjepkema, 2019), and poverty (Anderson & Collins, 2014). Historical practices, such as elders sacrificing themselves for the community (Spearim, 2020;Stegman, 2022), indicate a complex relationship with end-of-life decisions, yet current leaders voice strong opposition to expanded euthanasia (Agnieszka, 2021). ...
This study explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in Canada, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to CAD $1.273 trillion by 2047. With an estimated 2.6 million deaths in the voluntary scenario, mostly among mentally ill and elderly populations, this cost-saving measure raises significant ethical concerns. Financially incentivizing MAiD could shift healthcare priorities away from providing necessary support, potentially devaluing vulnerable lives and fostering a troubling reliance on assisted death as an economic solution. The findings highlight a need for ethical scrutiny of MAiD policy expansion.
... Native American scholarship, too, has increasingly been questioning the centrality of the framework (Kirmayer et al., 2014). Social anthropologist and Aaniiih-Gros Ventre tribal member Joseph P. Gone (2009Gone ( , 2013, for instance, acknowledges the reality of historical trauma, per se, but suggests that the psychological construct lacks scientific validity and functions primarily as "an entrenched folk discourse," one dependent upon a culture of therapy that then posits an inherent "psychic fragility." ...
Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) have a unique position in the landscape of higher education vis-à-vis trauma-informed pedagogy insofar as nearly all of their students identify with a cultural group that has experienced genocide, that continues to experience discrimination and poverty, and whose families are inevitably affected by serious psychological problems that plausibly might be considered as responses to trauma. In this paper, we principally concern ourselves with the healing role that TCUs are playing in the quest to repair the historical damage that has been done and also that continues to be done. Accordingly, we detail the important work they do. But, in doing so, we also closely examine the Indigenous historical trauma theoretical framework, which figures prominently in the thinking of many TCU staff, and suggest that a resiliency focus can helpfully assist with resolving a number of theoretical difficulties. We then move to assess the practical dimensions of healing and resilience in the Tribal College as staff members tackle the myriad challenges facing not only their students, but Tribal Nations more generally in the 21st century and beyond.
... The role of acculturation stress and struggles with identity formation (LaFromboise et al., 2010) and the disruption of rites of passage and other important cultural experiences can affect young people's connections to Indigenous values, beliefs, and worldviews (Rasmus et al., 2014). The Indigenous suicide literature emphasizes historical and ongoing structural violence within the processes of disadvantage, marginalization, and exclusion entwined in institutions and social policy (Kirmayer et al., 2014). A link between AIAN youth suicide and the harms of colonization is key to understanding the high preponderance of youth suicide in Indigenous communities. ...
Suicide research has focused primarily on risk factors at the individual level, overlooking the potential for community-level factors that confer protection from suicide. This study builds on the concept of cultural continuity from the Indigenous suicide prevention literature. It seeks to understand the collective influences shaping individual experiences across time and frames resilience as a culturally situated process that helps individuals to navigate challenges and facilitate positive health behaviors. A collaborative Alaska Native (AN) partnership designed the Protective Community Scale (PCS) to identify mutable community-level protective factors in rural AN communities hypothesized to reduce suicide among youth, who represent the highest risk demographic in this at-risk population. Study objectives were to (a) test the measurement structure of community-level protection from suicide, (b) select best functioning items to define this structure, and (c) test the association of community protection with community-level suicide deaths and attempts. In 65 rural AN communities, 3–5 residents (n = 251) were peer-nominated for their knowledge of local resources and completed the PCS in structured interviews. Findings show community members can reliably assess the theoretically rich, multidimensional community-level protective factor structure of cultural continuity with sufficient precision to establish its inverse association with community-level suicide. Community-level protection emerges as a promising approach for universal suicide prevention in Indigenous contexts that can guide multi-level strategies that expand beyond individual-level, tertiary prevention to focus on the continuity of cultural processes as resources to build protection. These findings point the field toward consideration of cultural continuity and community protection as key factors for Indigenous suicide prevention.
... Linking colonization to present-day disparities, historical trauma is a framework created by Lakota scholar Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al. (2011) to account for the vast disparities in mental health that persist across generations among Indigenous populations. Historical trauma was originally put forth to help contextualize native health issues as a form of colonial suffering and to help destigmatize recovery (Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses 2014). Historical trauma impacts psychological, physiological, and behavioral symptoms across many axes of mental health, manifesting in diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and unresolved grief (Garcia 2020). ...
Queer, trans, and Two‐Spirit native youth experience exponential increases in risk for health disparities, yet little is known about their distinct mental health needs. There remains a dearth of literature examining the unique intersection of Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, and age. As Indigenous populations in the United States have grown in the past decade, it is imperative to develop a comprehensive understanding of QT2S native youth mental health. The present work seeks to bridge the fields of scholarship on native youth and LGBTQ communities' mental health disparities to illuminate gaps in scientific understanding of QT2S native youth mental health. The current paper will discuss theoretical frameworks, methodological considerations, and mental health disparities scholarship on QT2S youth, concluding with research recommendations toward developing a scientific understanding of QT2S native youth mental health disparities.
... IGT is a distinct form of trauma, whereby the effects of trauma are transmitted across generations of families and communities (Isobel et al., 2019). Through IGT, trauma negatively affects individuals in ways that result in problems for their descendants (Kirmayer et al., 2014). Consequences of IGT include descendants of trauma-exposed parents/ communities experiencing mental health sequelae of PTSD, anxiety, and depression (Sangalang & Vang, 2017), or chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and cardiovascular problems, despite not being directly exposed to the trauma (Lefler & Belt, 2009). ...
... Despite calls to the contrary (i.e., Holmes et al., 2016), the trauma of oppression, including IGT, does not meet PTSD's diagnostic criterion A. This limits research on resilience in the context of oppression-based trauma. Thus, it is important to recognize both trauma and resilience for marginalized people and to do so from a historical, political, and ecological perspective (Kirmayer et al., 2014). Though resilience is the most common trajectory following trauma exposure, scholarship is (a) unclear on what facilitates resilience, (b) limited to an individualistic perspective, and (c) absent of cultural factors especially for marginalized communities (Raghavan & Sandanapitchai, 2024). ...
Today there are about one billion migrants worldwide and about 40 million migrants in the United States. Of these migrants, 3.5 million are of Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African (Arab/MENA) descent. The Arab/MENA community in the United States has been exposed to historical, premigration, perimigration, and postmigration trauma and stress. Despite the considerable research on migrants’ trauma exposure, much remains to be known about their resilience. More recently, the resilience literature has expanded beyond the micro (individual) level to explore resilience across the ecological system. Yet the chronosystem (time, intergenerational trauma, and resilience) and the process of passing on resilience within the context of oppression remain understudied. Thus, there is a need to understand intergenerational resilience, in the context of intergenerational trauma, defined as the transmission of resilience across generations for Arab/MENA communities. This study explored the lived experiences of intergenerational resilience for first- and second-generation Arab/MENA migrants (N = 19). Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three superordinate themes emerged including maintaining culture, cultivating resilience, and outcomes of resilience. Eight subthemes emerged including collective practices, intentional teaching, observational learning, firsthand experience, opportunity, positive identity, sense of belonging, and connection from a distance. Findings add to the literature by illuminating some processes for intergenerational resilience, identifying constructs for future empirical studies (e.g., family communication, cultural maintenance), and providing direction for intervention with this population. Implications for future research and practice are provided.
... Sociologists analyze how collective memory influences societal attitudes toward historical events, revealing its role in reinforcing or challenging dominant narratives (Barnett & Hyde, 2001). Meanwhile, cultural studies scholars investigate how post-memory is represented in literature and art to address historical erasure (Kirmayer et al., 2014). In Orphan Train, these themes intersect as Vivian's journey illustrates how familial relationships mediate the legacy of trauma while fostering resilience. ...
The concept of post-memory, introduced by Marianne Hirsch, offers a framework for understanding how collective memory is transmitted across generations. This study examines intergenerational trauma through a qualitative descriptive analysis of Christina Baker Klein's novel Orphan Train. It focuses on Vivian Daly’s traumatic experiences as an orphan train rider and their impact on her identity and familial memory. The research aims to explore how Vivian’s past shapes her understanding of her history, her role within her family narrative, and how family narratives and inherited objects contribute to preserving memory and transmitting trauma intergenerationally. Findings reveal that family narratives and objects play a critical role in maintaining memory and shaping familial identity. These elements not only preserve individual experiences but also act as conduits for transmitting collective trauma across generations. Contextually, this study highlights the broader relevance of post-memory in social situations such as migration or cultural conflict, where trauma influence’s identity formation and community ties. By situating its findings within the discourse on collective memory and trauma, this research contributes to understanding how personal and familial histories intersect to shape intergenerational identities. This study underscores the importance of considering intergenerational trauma in analysing collective memory processes. Keywords: Collective Memory; Family Narratives; Intergenerational Trauma; Post-Memory
... The concepts and values related to happiness and well-being differ greatly throughout cultures. Well-being in many Indigenous cultures is closely linked to relationships with the community and environmental stewardship, with the group's and the land's health taking precedence above individual goals (Kirmayer et al., 2014). This stands in stark contrast to Western ideas that frequently link happiness to one's achievements and liberties. ...
The chapter conceptualizes the distinct conceptual perspectives on the theme of well-being, which further introduces the research constructs and theoretical underpinnings that exist around the model. The chapter represents the existent scales that substantiate to ‘measure' the psychological state of Employee well-being. A multi-disciplinary approach is enunciated to determine its significance in organizational parlance; besides stating its significance to practitioners and theorists. The narrative also includes a brief discussion on the gendered approach to well-being, which devotes the prepositions around the notion of gender and happiness. The chapter offers a holistic understanding around the concept of well-being, approaches around it, research constructs and finally, its articulation to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs).
