To illustrate consider how a young black man may experience

To illustrate, consider how a young black man may experience his blackness when he is home with family and friends compared to if he is pulled over by the police for a minor traffic infraction. In this example, there may be neutral or positive psychosocial import of being black when with family and friends; while one would suspect the encounter with the police officer would activate strong race-consciousness, psychosocial distress, and vigilance, together stimulating the physiological stress process, before any words are exchanged with the police officer and for at least the duration of the encounter. Thus, Jedi Public Health construes the health impacts of social identity to be dynamic and environmentally contingent, rather than biologically or culturally essential, or reducible to behaviors, traits, or material assets (Geronimus, 2013). In JPH, the prominent biological mechanism through which contingencies of social identity influence health is repeated physiological stress process activation, or allostatic load (Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, & Bound, 2006; McEwen & Seeman, 1999; Seeman, McEwen, Rowe, & Singer, 2001). Stress-activated biological (allostatic) systems enable people to respond to changing physical aspects of the surround and to cope with ambient stressors such as noise and crowding, imminent danger, hunger, extreme temperature shifts, or infection. Some stressors are objective (e.g., temperature extremes) and others are subjective (e.g., financial anxiety); some are passing, and some are prolonged or chronic, including those that require sustained cognitive and emotional engagement to mitigate, resist, or undo (Geronimus, 2000; James, 1994). Notably, all these stressors may have negative physiological impacts whether or not they are identified as taxing by those under stress. As McEwen (1998) notes, the body’s reaction to a stress‐induced challenge is twofold: turning on an allostatic response that introduces a complex cascade of stress KN-93 hydrochloride manufacturer into the body, and then shutting off this response when the threat has receded. When – because of sustained or repeated stress – allostatic systems are not completely deactivated, the body experiences long-term exposure to stress hormones that can cause wear and tear on the cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune systems. This wear and tear increases susceptibility to infectious disease; early onset of chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, morbid obesity, and metabolic syndrome; as well as mood disorders, functional limitations, and early death (McEwen, 2003, 2000, 1998; Seeman et al., 2001). Through this and other mechanisms, identifying – or being identified by others – as a member of either a socially privileged or a socially stigmatized population group in everyday settings exerts disparate health impacts on the human biological canvas. Evidence of such weathering – the increased physiological vulnerability, early health deterioration, and accelerated aging of marginalized compared to other population groups — has been well-documented in the US for blacks (Geronimus et al., 2006, 2015; Geronimus & Thompson, 2004), and also suggested for Latino immigrants with longer duration of the US residence (Kaestner, Pearson, Keene, & Geronimus, 2009) and the poorest urban and rural US whites (Geronimus, Bound, & Colen, 2011; Geronimus et al., 2015). Differences in life experiences shaped by dominant belief systems about what can be expected of and is deserved by specific population groups, and the corollary frames for interpreting experiences, translate social inequality into health inequality.
Conceptual and evidentiary building blocks for Jedi Public Health
Jedi Public Health practice Major advances are being made in the study of stress physiology – its impacts on molecular dynamics, biological systems, and ultimate links to poor health in individuals (Everson-Rose & Lewis, 2005; McEwen, 1998; McEwen & Seeman, 1999; Spruill, 2010). As well, approaches to managing and mitigating stress through personal behavior are being proposed both by scientists (McEwen, 1998), and also as a growing part of popular culture (Altman, 2014; Tuller, 2002). However, investigation of the nature and potential mitigation of structurally inherent stressors that activate physiological stress processes inequitably across populations in everyday life to induce weathering is lacking. JPH is a call to fill in this gap, and provides an evidence-based framework for starting to do so.