Dr. Patricia Louie, University of Washington, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Title: The Black-White Mental Health Paradox: What Role Does Skin Tone play?
Abstract: This paper considers whether the tendency for Black Americans to report better mental health than White Americans varies by skin tone. Using data from a community sample, we examine whether the race paradox in mental health holds for Black Americans with light, medium, and dark skin tones relative to White Americans. We also examine whether a key coping resource, self-esteem, explains the paradox for all skin tone groups. Findings indicate that the paradox holds for depressive symptoms, but not for DSM-IV mood and anxiety disorders. For DSM-IV mood and anxiety disorders, we find that Black Americans with light skin tone are no different than White Americans, but Black Americans with medium and dark skin tone have significantly lower odds of disorder. In terms of self-esteem, we find that all Black Americans, regardless of skin tone have higher levels of self-esteem than White Americans. We also demonstrate that if Black Americans across the skin tone spectrum did not have higher levels of self-esteem than White Americans, they would have higher significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than White Americans. While self-esteem reduced the difference in DSM-IV disorder between Black Americans with medium and dark skin tone to non-significance, the addition of self-esteem did not result in higher odds of disorder for this group.
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