Pratyusha Tummala-Narra

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Boston College

Sexual violence (SV) against college men is a significant national public health concern. Yet, there is a dearth of research pertaining to this problem, particularly with respect to SV experiences faced by racial minority college men (RMCM). The present study aimed to address extant research gaps by investigating how sociocultural socialization and...

Identity formation among immigrant communities, particularly for ethnic–racial minorities like Asian Indian Americans, is a multifaceted process. Shaped by preimmigration histories of British colonization and the caste system and the Indian diasporic postimmigration, experiences of physical and psychological displacement alongside racism in the Uni...

A majority of Muslim American college students have grown up exclusively within a post-9/11 climate of surveillance and discrimination. Recent events such as the Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” and the Israel–Hamas War have led to additional spikes in Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslim Americans. Developmentally, college students ar...

This essay explores the inextricable connection between the psyche and the social, and its relevance to contemporary global challenges, such as isolation and polarization. The author discusses the possibilities that psychoanalysis holds for the public good, underscoring the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to understanding the social world a...

In the United States, Muslims live in a climate of heightened Islamophobia and racism. While research has indicated the negative mental health impacts of discrimination among Muslim Americans, the relationship between specific types of discrimination and mental health among 1.5- and 2nd-generation racial minority immigrant-origin Muslim American em...

Few studies have focused on the racial socialization of Indian Americans, particularly those raised in the United States. The present study explored 1.5 and 2nd generation Indian Americans’ experiences of racial socialization in multiple contexts. Forty-four adult Indian Americans from diverse regions of the United States participated in semi-struc...

Over the past two decades, there have been significant strides towards an improved understanding of race and culture in clinical supervision. Yet, there continues to be less attention directed towards the influence of the contemporary sociocultural context on the lives of supervisees and supervisors. This manuscript explores how race and culture ar...

Dr. Kris Yi’s article elucidates Asian Americans’ experiences of racial trauma. Dr. Yi’s insights are both critical and compelling as she brings the racial pain of Asian Americans to the foreground of psychoanalytic inquiry. She illustrates how the model minority stereotype and gendered racism shape the disillusionment that many Asian Americans fac...

Sexual violence against women is a significant public health crisis that is understudied among Mexican American communities. Yet, there has been little attention directed to sociocultural factors that shape conceptualizations of and responses to sexual violence among Mexican American women. Guided by an integrative contextual framework, this qualit...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives around the world. For Asian Americans, the disruptions due to illness, as well as isolation and economic insecurity, have been compounded by the rise in anti-Asian racism. In response, the Asian American Journal of Psychology has curated a special issue on Asian America and the COVID-19 Pandemic, spread ove...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes as well as other forms of discrimination. As a result, Asian Americans have had to contend with not just the isolation, illness, and economic difficulties of the pandemic but also the rise in anti-Asian sentiment. In order to spotlight the ways in which Asian Americans h...

Theorizing about the unconscious has been largely based on white, Euro-American notions of the primitive, dismissing the perspectives of nonwhite people and contributing to individual and collective injustice. Importantly, foundational conceptualizations of human development, such as those regarding the concept of dependency, have been shaped throu...

Bruce Herzog offers an important elaboration of a parent’s refusal to let go of a child and the subsequent psychological burden placed on the child. The pain of separation is underscored as the child must negotiate differentiation at a cost of losing connection to an overly demanding parent. This commentary focuses on the role of traumatic stress o...

This article focuses on multicultural training, practice, and intervention for health service psychologists (HSPs) and applied psychologists (APs). A rationale for the provision of multiculturally-responsive services within the healthcare sector is presented. A brief historical overview of key contributions that promoted multicultural-responsivenes...

The accounts of three Black authors (also patients and therapists), Matee, Jwili, and Vilakazi, offer a unique opportunity to expand understandings of racial trauma and racial dynamics in psychotherapy, and call for systemic change in psychoanalysis toward racial equity and inclusivity. This commentary elaborates on the issue of racial trauma withi...

There has been a call for increased attention to experiences of sociocultural contexts and their role in mental health and help-seeking among specific subgroups of Asian Americans (Leong, Park, & Kalibatseva, 2013). In particular, as suggested by the integrative contextual framework of minority youth development (García Coll & Marks, 2012), racial...

Child sex trafficking is a global crisis with devastating consequences physically, psychologically, and socially. Psychologically, child sex trafficking survivors often face post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicidal ideation, and substance dependence, among other consequences. Children and adolescents from marginalized communities face i...

The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law, and Public Policy is the first volume to review the intersecting implications of psychology, public policy, and law with the goal of understanding and ending the challenges facing racial minority youth in America today. Proceeding roughly from causes to consequences—from early life experiences to...

This commentary is a response to Dr. Rachael Peltz’s paper (this issue) concerning the experience of resignation syndrome among refugee children in Sweden, and more broadly extreme traumatic stress endured by refugees globally. Dr. Peltz’s paper raises important questions for psychoanalytic practitioners and scholars concerning our engagement with...

The presence and growing visibility of racial minority immigrants in the United States and across the globe has triggered a sense of collective anxiety, where dissociative defenses maintain emotional distance and identification with groups perceived to be threatening. Fringe movements and mainstream political parties have framed immigrants and refu...

Sexual violence against women is a national and global public health concern that is understudied in immigrant communities. Specifically, little attention has been directed toward sexual violence against women within Indian American communities and toward the role of sociocultural experiences on conceptualizations of sexual violence among this subg...

The initial version of the Multicultural Guidelines, titled Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists, was published in 2002. Since then, there has been significant growth in research and theory regarding multicultural contexts. The revised Multicultural Guidelines are conceptua...

South Asians, or individuals with ancestral roots in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, constitute one of the fastest growing groups of Asian immigrants in the United States (Inman and Tummala-Narra 2010; U.S. Census Bureau, Population projections of the United States by age, sex, race and Hispanic Origin: 1992 to 2050, 2010). South...

Guided by an integrative contextual framework of immigrant youth development (García Coll & Marks, 2012), this study investigated the potential role of developmental (e.g., ethnic identity) and contextual factors (e.g., perceived discrimination, stereotyping) in mental health outcomes and help-seeking attitudes, and variations across gender and nat...

This commentary is a response to Veronica Csillag’s exploration of the influence of historical and transgenerational trauma on the lives of immigrants, and on the psychoanalytic process (this issue). Dr. Csillag’s paper deepens our understanding of the intrapsychic life of immigrants who have suffered collective trauma pre-migration and continue to...

Although issues of gender and violence among immigrant communities have gained some recognition, little is known about the role of cultural factors in attitudes toward gender and sexual violence among Asian Indians in the United States. This study investigated the relationship between ethnic identity and gender-related attitudes, attitudes toward s...

While there has been increasing attention directed toward sociocultural issues in psychoanalytic scholarship and recent efforts to integrate cultural competence as a core emphasis in psychoanalytic theory and practice, there have been no empirical investigations of how cultural competence is conceptualized by psychoanalytic psychologists. The prese...

Human trafficking is maintained within a context of intersecting forms of oppression. Cultural oppression, including racism and ethnic bias, creates additional risk for human trafficking and generates unique challenges for prevention and intervention. There are, however, cultural strengths that survivors of human trafficking have that may be utiliz...

This commentary expands on the problem of culturally imposed trauma described by Dorothy Evans Holmes. The focus on cultural trauma is both timely and necessary. I applaud Holmes’s attention to this important issue, and her clear articulation of its effects on intrapsychic and interpersonal life and the reluctance of psychoanalysis to engage with c...

Despite the significant growth in the South Asian population in the United States over the past 2 decades, the experiences of South Asian adolescents have remained largely invisible. Guided by a socioecological perspective (American Psychological Association, 2012; García Coll & Marks, 2012), this study examined South Asian adolescents' experiences...

Sexual violence against women and girls remains a global public health problem, regardless of growing awareness of its negative impact on women’s and girls’ physical and psychological well-being. This chapter explores the experiences of sexual violence among racial minority women from immigrant-origin (first and second generation) backgrounds in th...

Immigrant-origin adolescents in the United States face a number of stressors across different social contexts (e.g., home, school), and yet, distress related to these stressors often goes unnoticed and access to resources is limited. This study examined how racial minority immigrant-origin adolescents in an urban setting construct and negotiate exp...

The current study examined how historical, social, and political contexts in their country of origin and their host country have influenced first-generation Asian Indians’ racialized experiences in the United States. We conducted nine separate focus groups with a total of 50 first-generation Asian Indian participants (20 men and 30 women). In a sem...

Marie is a 14-year-old Haitian immigrant student who recently met with her guidance counselor at school because she had become increasingly withdrawn in the classroom and had stopped communicating with her teachers and classmates. She attends an ethnically diverse school, where she has several friends, most of whom are also Haitian American. She mo...

Although racial minority immigrant-origin adolescents compose a rapidly growing sector of the U.S. population, few studies have examined the role of contextual factors in mental health among these youth. The present study examined the relationship between ethnic identity and depressive symptoms, the relationship between perceived social support and...

The experience of interpersonal violence among immigrants is influenced by preand postmigration sociocultural factors. Although psychoanalytic theory has made significant contributions to a complex understanding of traumatic stress and of intrapsychic experiences of immigration, the experience of interpersonal violence in an immigrant context has n...

Psychoanalytic theory has been criticized for decontextualizing individual development. While recognizing the historical neglect of sociocultural context in psychoanalytic theory, this article raises attention to psychoanalytic contributions to the exploration of sociocultural issues in psychotherapy and calls for a systematic inclusion of cultural...

Much clinical and trauma work has focused on interventions with individuals experiencing interpersonal violence and past traumas. Refugees' experiences include past and present and chronic intergroup and interpersonal traumas with cumulative linear and nonlinear dynamics. Refugees face unique social and political traumatogenic ecologies that can pl...

Recent studies have documented the high prevalence of violence exposure among urban youth, and the association between violence exposure and mental health symptomology (Copeland–Linder, Lambert, & Ialongo, 2010; Mendelson, Turner, & Tandon, 2010). Less attention has been directed to violence exposure across diverse groups and the role of protective...

Though one could argue that the history of psychoanalysis is intimately linked with the experience of immigration, the fact is that psychoanalytic theorizing about this experience, and its implications for treatment, have lagged far behind, even as psychoanalytic theorists have increasingly examined other nontraditional topics, such as those having...

Racial minority immigrant-origin individuals experience a host of complex mental health stressors and experience disparities in mental health care provision, which may be compounded by language and cultural barriers. The present study explored the perspectives of White, Euro American clinicians who work with racial minority immigrant-origin clients...

Introduces the current special issue of the journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. This special issue focuses on the topic of immigration and highlights the important within group differences often overlooked when immigrants are conceptualized as a homogeneous group. The articles in this journal consider a variety of microsyste...

Although discrimination has been found to contribute to psychological distress among immigrant populations, there are few studies that have examined the relationship between racial and ethnic discrimination in the school setting among foreign-born immigrant and U.S.-born immigrant-origin adolescents. This study examined the relationship between per...

Immigration imposes changes in gender role expectations and sexual expression that can contribute to acculturative stress and intergenerational conflicts. This article focuses on how immigrant and first-generation South Asian women in the United States negotiate losses incurred in immigration and navigate multiple cultural contexts. Immigrant women...

Although there has been an increase in enrollment of Muslim international students in college campuses in the United States over the past decade, few studies have examined the experiences of cultural adjustment among Muslim graduate international students. In the present qualitative study, we examined graduate students' experiences of acculturation...

There is considerable tension within psychoanalysis regarding the place of social context in the individual’s inner life. In recent years, applications of psychoanalytic theory have extended to contexts outside of the therapeutic setting, and psychoanalytic scholars have increasingly attended to issues of race and culture within the therapeutic set...

Although the psychological literature has focused more on immigrant women's roles in their families, women's friendships are important sources of support and identity development. This article explores the development of friendship in the context of immigration, cultural adaptation, becoming a template for identity and intimacy. Specifically, the a...

This work serves to celebrate the strengths of women of color, identify unique opportunities, and examine the specific challenges and issues of this group. Psychological Health of Women of Color: Intersections, Challenges, and Opportunities is an anthology that examines core issues of women of color's emotional health and well-being. Organized by s...

Several risk factors, including female sex, racial minority status, and family poverty, have been implicated in adolescents' depression. The present study focused on the role of one specific aspect of adolescents' ecological context, interactions with adults, in depressive symptomology. We examined the relationship between perceived support from ad...

Although research supports the critical need for cultural competence in clinical practice, few studies have addressed practitioners' perspectives on their psychotherapeutic practices with ethnic minority clients. This study examined whether personal orientation to diversity (universal-diverse orientation or UDO), perceived access to institutional r...