#268 Racial Trauma And Mental Health

We talk about how racism can shape mental health outcomes even when race itself isn’t biological, and why the harm is still measurable in the body and in healthcare systems. We connect research, lived experience, and practical reflection to name racial trauma, unpack mistrust, and hold on to resilience while pushing for systemic change. 

• Springtime grounding and noticing how nature affects mood 
• Journaling prompt on doing something purely for yourself 
• Pacing the conversation and taking breaks when needed 
• Race as a social construct and racism as observable harm 
• Racial trauma and allostatic load as chronic stress buildup 
• Why data matters when communities say care feels unequal 
• Evidence on disparities in inpatient psychiatric restraint 
• Workforce gaps and the value of cultural match in therapy 
• Medical mistrust and the Chapati study as an ethics warning 
• Intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and famine examples 
• DSM-5 not formally recognizing racial trauma and the risk of misdiagnosis 
• Limits of individual therapy for systemic racism 
• Social determinants of health and the need for top-down policy change 
• Resilience, cultural connection, and the science of repair 
• Practical ways to challenge bias in daily life 

Tune in weekly to Wellbeing Wednesday with Gurjeet Gill on The Universal Radio Network, 97.9 FM in Edmonton, or globally at www.theuniversalradio.com

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Transcript

Spring Grounding And Check-In

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Universal Radio Networks podcast. My name is Grajit, and in today's episode, we're discussing race and its impacts on mental health. We're gonna talk about all things mental health, resiliency, trauma, as well as intergenerational trauma. So stay tuned, and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Universal Radio Network. My name is Grigit, and this is Wellbeing Wednesday. I feel a little bit more calm, a little bit more chill this Wednesday than I might usually, and that is for a very good reason. Alright, the weather is so nice out. Oh my gosh. I it was so warm out that I could walk my dog in the morning before work, and I was sweating. Like genuinely, I was worried I was gonna overheat. And for me, when the weather changes, spring is my favorite season. Everything feels so hopeful, things feel so different. Like I know it can bring a lot of stress. For example, tax season, uh, exams are coming up around the quarter in April, end of semester, summer jobs. It could be a pretty busy season for pretty much both adults and young people alike. But one thing that makes it so bearable is the fact that it's light out when I go to work, it's light out when I come back from work. I get to actually see the sky, and it's blue, and there's beautiful white puffy clouds everywhere. And it just changes me. All right. I'm a simple person. When I feel more connected to nature, I feel more grounded and paying attention to things like the weather and how it makes me feel, it does have an impact. Like, after all, biologically and like evolutionary speaking, the weather has affected us a lot more than sitting inside in climate-controlled boxes all day. And it sounds a little hippie-dippy woo-woo, whatever, but it's like you can't argue with the fact that we've had like thousands of years of evolution work in one way, and realistically, only like a couple hundred years work in the opposite way. So evolution doesn't work that fast. As much as we like to think we're a different species than we were a couple hundred years ago, it's just simply, simply not true. The weather does affect us, and spring makes me feel hopeful. So, today's topic, we're talking about racial impacts and mental health. So, we're gonna talk about the concept of race a little bit and how it impacts our mental health. How come there's worse mental health outcomes for people of certain races? Shouldn't our mental health be treated the same and seen the same? And if so, why are there differences there? And how come, even when we account for things like class and economic status and income, people are still experiencing worse healthcare outcomes if they're a person of color, especially if they're indigenous or black. So we're gonna talk a little bit about race and mental health. And I just want to open up the conversation a little bit. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, if you have any ideas for topics that you'd like to share, you can feel free to text us at 780-887-0979, or you can DM us on Instagram at Big Universal Radio. So today's journaling prompt question is what was the last thing that you did for yourself that was entirely for yourself? You didn't do it because it was an obligation or an expectation, but you did it purely because it was for you and what you wanted to do. It's not like, oh, on the way home I picked up Chipotle for me and my family. Like, that's still for other people. I'm talking about like purely selfishly. What's something that you've done for just yourself? Let me know what it was, how did it feel, and honestly, I'm just really curious. What was the last selfish thing you did? So, some things that we kind of have to consider about the conversation of race and mental health is it can bring up a lot of trauma. It can be an upsetting topic to talk about. So, before we head too deep into it, I do want to remind you that this is your space. You're welcome to take a breath when you need it, take a breather when you need it, take a pause when you need it. It's absolutely in your control. And if it's upsetting, like I encourage you, reach out to trusted friends and family who you can have a conversation about your feelings with. Reach out to a mental health professional. You can contact the Edmonton Distress Line. You can contact 211 if you're not sure what mental health resources are available for you. They're always easy and able to be reached out to. So I talked about our journaling prompt question, which is what's something that you've done recently just for yourself? And for me, one thing that I can think of is something I did just for myself, is I went and I ate out at a really fancy, nice restaurant all by myself. This restaurant is pretty swanky, it's a little bit on the bougier end, meals are a little bit pricier, like the cheaper entrees are like 25 bucks, but I had a coupon and I was too lazy to make plans with anyone else to go and enjoy this restaurant together. So I decided, you know what, I deserve a little break, and I also deserve to not have to cook or do dishes. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to this fancy restaurant by myself. And that's exactly what I did. I didn't really dress up either. I went straight after work and I just sat down and I was like, table for one, and it was really nice. It was a yummy meal. I felt so full afterwards. The waitress was amazing and super kind and nice to me, and it was my my selfish deed of the week where I got to do something because I wanted to do it. There was no obligation to anyone else, and it was just a little pick-me-up treat and the end of my week there. So, going back to the main topic at hand, I I am so curious though, if you have done anything selfish this week so far. If not, what's something that you got planned? Because you deserve to be taken care of. You deserve to feel happy and healthy, and you deserve to do something entirely for yourself. We don't need a reason. We can just do it. We want to. It's the beauty of freedom, it's the beauty of having free will. So I going back to the conversation about race, I do want to share that this episode is kind of take us through a lot of different experiences. For example, we're gonna talk about the history and the science behind how race can impact mental health and how different mental health experiences are impacted by the fact that you're classified as one race or another. And I see this all the time. And us being a predominantly South Asian audience here, I know we're no strangers to it, but to this day at work, sometimes I ask people like, What is your ethnicity? And they kind of like pause and they're confused because I should be looking at them and assuming their identity. And a lot of times they'll say something like, Oh, I'm Canadian, oh, I'm Caucasian, oh, I'm just like, I don't know, like regular. Honest to God, I've had someone say, I'm just regular, when I've asked them what ethnicity they are. And we need it for demographic information, but I think it's so crazy that there's still people out there that aren't really sure because they've never had to think about it. And for for you and me both, there's a very good chance that we've had to think about it. Even if you're someone who's not South Asian, you're listening to this, there's a very good chance that you're the kind of person who has had to think about race in a critical sense, challenge your own beliefs and challenge the beliefs of others. First things first, we have to talk about race in the context of mental health, and we need to be sure that we're on the same page. Because, first of all, race is not a biological fact, it is simply not a fact that has anything to do with who we are. It's simply a classification term that's existed because we live in a society, as a Joker would say. Race is entirely a social construct. It's not like ethnicity where you belong to a certain cultural group, it's not like your religious affiliation because you belong as a member of a certain faith, it's not nationality, which is clear, well, quote unquote, clear defined borders, because not every country is respecting borders. Uh it's not anything like that. It's something we simply made up. And like the lines around race have changed over the years. Did you know that Irish-Itan people were considered not white for a long time in the United States, and they were in fact like discriminated against and not classified as white. Isn't that wild? It's entirely a social construct. People draw and redraw the lines around race and what races are okay and what races are not okay. And here's the thing: it's not biologically real, but racism is absolutely biologically real. The harm that racism causes is observable. We can document it, we can measure it. We have measures in scientific studies, we can see how it shows up in our bodies, in our brains, and its behaviors. So race is not real as much as we've made it a real thing. But racism and its impacts, very much real. Researchers actually have a term for the psychological harm that comes from experiencing racism, and it's called racial trauma. And it's actually a professor from, or psychologist, sorry, from the University of Ottawa, who's done this really cool paper, and she outlines the ways that racism affects mental health through four different channels. She talks about the access to opportunity, exposure to certain risk factors, patterns of cognitive and emotional processing, and the way that people cope and regulate their stress. So that last one absolutely matters, that coping and regulating with your stress. Because when you live in a society or community that sends you consistent, ever-present messaging that can be both overt and covert about how you are less valuable, less trustworthy, less safe, about how you deserve less, about how you've worked less. Your nervous system and your brain responds to how you're treated. Whether or not any of your own actions align with any of those things where you have proven to be less trustworthy, less safe, less uh intelligent, less worthy of a job, even if you've done nothing to show that those things are true about you, unfortunately, it does not matter because the way people treat you and perceive you can create a certain reality. So when you're always scanning environments, walking into rooms and noticing that you're the only person of color or you're the only male in the room, or you're the only female in the room, or that you're the youngest person or the oldest person in the room, we notice every single time. And that hypervigilance takes a toll. And researchers call that allostatic load. That is the buildup of chronic stress, whether it's physical or psychological, and it takes a toll. As we talk about race and racism and mental health, it's important to understand that we have to have research to back this up. Because there is a common saying among black communities in the United States where you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. And that can be an incredibly, unbelievably disappointing thing to hear when you are driven, you are motivated, and you want to make the best out of the life that you have. Because it's a short one, let me tell you. We'll never get over the fact that we have one life to live, make it a good one. But learning off the bat that you have to work doubly as hard as your peers to only get as half as far, to make up half as much money, to achieve half as much, get half as much recognition, it's disappointing. And oftentimes when we're people of color talking about race and racism, the other person that we're speaking to has to really want to receive what we have to say. And we can do that through data and numbers in a Western society where we are so numbers-focused, so quantitative, so analytical, so biological, so scientific, if that's what's respected for now, because who knows where things are going geopolitically in terms of how we view education. But for now, that's the way things are. So we need race data to back up these claims that it makes our mental health worth, that there's disparities around mental health. Fun fact, I actually spent a year working as a research assistant for a scoping review about existing literature on how uh racialized youth had experienced uh healthcare. So it was like their experiences at doctors, psychologists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, you name it, across like England, the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, basically English-speaking countries uh that have a predominantly white population. So looking at this data, and it was over 2,000 articles that I'm just reading over and over and over and over and over again, and the messaging is the same that even when people account for things like income level, age, if we compare apples to apples, and the only difference is one of the apples is a little bit darker than the one next to it, they still experience worse healthcare outcomes. That was what all literature, all 2000 plus papers that ended up being like a hundred. Well, actually, no, not a hundred, a couple hundred, closer to maybe 800 if I'm remembering correctly, that ended up being used for the study, but whatever. That was so long ago. But that was the gist of what every paper was saying. And it can be really disheartening. In 2024, there was a rapid review published at Science Direct that looked at ethnic disparities in inpatient psychiatric care. And they found that black patients had significantly higher odds of being physically restrained compared to white patients, where people are already in crisis, people are incredibly vulnerable, people are presenting with these same behaviors of being erratic or hard to deal with, but yet we view white patients as more deserving of understanding and nonviolent means. And we see this in other places in healthcare too, where people believe that black people's pain tolerances were naturally higher and they wouldn't give them pain medication for that reason. Whenever I think about this that statistic, and then knowing that there is this historic stigmatism towards black people believing that they had higher pain tolerances in medical societies, it just hurts to hear. And instead of responding with care and understanding, with trauma-informed empathy with a help, it they're treated like a threat, you're treated with force. And there's a saying like an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind. And when you treat people like they're violent, that they're a threat, that they're unwelcome, people don't respond well to being physically restrained. That's natural. There is also a workforce gap. So a university from the Michigan School of Public Health found that only 4% of psychologists in the USA are black. Only 4%. In a country where black Americans face some of the highest rates of racial trauma, and where there's a known fact that a cultural match between a clinician and a client is linked with better outcomes, then it's not a small gap anymore. Like only 4%, considering how high the population of black Americans exist in the United States of America, it's just frankly unbelievable. It's something I've talked about similarly here, where a lot of South Asian mental health crises get self-medicated through alcohol, with drug usage, with shutting down, with withdrawing. And when we don't have that cultural understanding of what is there in the background, what has led someone to a certain place, what kind of messaging there is in their community, what kind of pressures they face, there's really not an understanding of how to work with them in their mental state and support them psychologically. And we've seen, like in the last 10 years, like Edmonton, South Asian counselor population has grown so much. Where we have now a counseling office, multiple, I believe there's at least two that I know of that come to mind that are South Asian-owned and work with the South Asian community to serve them and to provide culturally relevant experiences, culturally relevant support. And there's also a question of trust. Historically, there's been a lot of mistrust in South Asian communities and medical fields. Talk to your grandparents, man, about how they think a Western white doctor would treat them. They have no belief, no trust. And then there's that famous study in um, I believe it was England. I don't quote me on that because I'm going off of memory here. But they gave a lot of elderly South Asian patients radioactive ruknia to study them without their consent. So they basically enlisted all these South Asian people in this study. Actually, you know what? During the music break, I'm gonna look up the facts on this, but I swear to God, I am telling you the truth. This is not like a paranoid conspiracy theory. This really happened. In England, these doctors were testing out this, I believe, treatment for thyroidism, and their reaction was to basically serve all these older brown people, radioactive rotia, and it just gave them huge amounts of cancer and more thyroid problems going down the line. I'll find more information about it and get back to you. But there's a lot of medical mistrust between people of color and the medical communities in predominantly white English-speaking countries. Okay, I knew I wasn't crazy. The study I'm thinking of is real. So it was called the Chapati study. And basically, all these young British South Asian women were being studied about iron absorption. That was it. It was iron absorption, not thyroids. So I was wrong about that. But basically, they weren't told that the rotia they were eating were radioactive and had something in them. In their minds, they were just part of the study, and their doctors had recommended that they do it, and they were just eating it. Some women claimed that they thought it was for arthritis, some people thought it was for studying overall health, some people thought it was about God knows what. But it raised a serious question of like how ethical was this if the people participating weren't informed, didn't properly register that they were eating radioactive substances, and it could produce adverse health care outcomes. And a lot of people are still upset about this years later because, well, what happened? These women were treated like guinea pigs without their consent, without their informed participation in the study. How can this be ethical? So people have looked into it since, and I feel like the people who were the victims of it, few of which have died since the study started, don't really understand, not really don't really understand, don't really feel like the issue has been resolved. So this is all to highlight the medical mistrust that exists between people of color, South Asian communities, and doctors. In the same way that your family members probably don't trust cops or politicians, is probably how they feel a little bit about doctors, if I'm being fully honest. So it's also known that our body's reactions to stress and trauma can get passed down intergenerationally. And it honestly. Is kind of healing to understand intergenerational trauma and also really stinking depressing. So it gets passed down through our genes because epigenetics is a thing. The stressful experiences that the older generations have gone through have rewired their genes, just like the stressful experiences we've gone through. A la 2019-2020 global pandemic that shut us all down. And I don't believe anyone who says that they weren't a crazy person in COVID because that changed us. And the epigenetics around something like that can get passed down to our children. And just like the things that our parents have experienced get passed down, we'll probably do the same. For example, if you're I can only really speak from like my experience, but I'm the first person in my family to not experience like a politically led genocide. My grandparents were either born during or shortly after the Bakstan border, and my parents dealt with um all this stuff with uh sick. Yeah, it's a lot. I don't want to really get into it, but come on. It was kind of wild what was going on. My parents went through very stressful experiences, just like I'm sure a lot of your parents did as well out there. It's something to think about the intergenerational, intergenerational trauma piece. So epigenetics specifically is about how genes are expressed through underlying DNA sequences that actually change. So, speaking of ethics of research and dealing with people of color, I will say that bioethics and informed consent and participation has changed quite a bit. And the rules are much more rigorous and strenuous now than they were back then. That being said, there are a lot of South Asian researchers who are leading the forefront on uh specific population research because they bring that cultural aspect. It's for us by us. It's really, really important to recognize that having South Asian people participate in the research on South Asian community is important. The beautiful thing about research nowadays is you are allowed to ask questions about how your data is stored, what you're undergoing, and being an informed and willing participant is most important overall. After all, the reason why we're even talking about this stuff today is because March 21st is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Racial discrimination shows up in all aspects of our lives. I also think it's really important to participate in research, especially when it is being done about South Asian people, because when we live in this biomedical Western world that values numbers and data and science, again, for now, it's important to have our people represented in this, especially with the way cancer affects the South Asian community, the way it affects a lot of different communities. I myself know at least three close family members who have either passed away from cancer, have recovered from cancer, or experiencing cancer right now. It shows up in our families, and it's important to take care of ourselves. So going back to epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, there's epigenetics, which is the study of how genes are expressed without the underlying DNA sequence actually changing. And research suggests that traumatic stress can alter gene expression in ways that are potentially heritable. For example, famines are a great way to think about this. If you think about the Bengali famine, a lot of the epigenetics of the people that survived carried over to the next generation, and you find that there's DNA that is more likely to hold on to fat, that is more likely to survive long periods without eating. And when we look at what's happening in Palestine right now, where there are people being starved, when we look at Congo and Sudan, where there are people without access to stable food, we know that that impact is not just now. If we resolve these issues with a snap of our fingers today, it means that the next generations are also gonna have DNA that has been permanently changed and is inherited. So your grandparents' terror, fear, grief, their ability to survive, all of that has left marks on our bodies as we grow up, grow old. Another 2024 policy brief from the Network, Network for Public Health Law outlines interjection intergenerational trauma amongst multiple communities because this isn't something that's specific to race. For example, there are white populations of Europeans who have experienced famine themselves, like the Holodomor or Holocaust survivors. It's not necessarily related to race, but the violence that occurs to people through race, that institutionalized systemic starvation, race plays a factor in why that happened and why it happened to some people and not others. I will say overall things are getting better when it comes to race and mental health, but something that isn't remiss is that the DSM 5 actually doesn't formally recognize racial trauma as a diagnosis, and it is something that people can experience. And what's really unfortunate is that without people being trained in it formally or being forced to be trained in it, then there's a good chance that it can get misdiagnosed. In fact, because it's not even a thing that exists, we can't even really track data or statistics on it. But we know that racism exists in our society at fundamental levels, from interaction to interaction to systemic policy levels. So if it exists at all these levels, why wouldn't it have an impact on people? Enough to be diagnosable, enough for us to track it, enough for us to understand it and give it merit. Because if we acknowledge it, then we can treat it. But if we ignore it, it's gonna continue to exist as a problem without any formal recognition. And the symptoms of racial trauma can look like anxiety, hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional numbing. And that can then be chalked up to something like generalized anxiety disorder or PTSD, but it's not really being addressed. The root problem is not being addressed. And people are trying to change this. For example, there's a 2025 paper, the Journal of Behavioral Sciences, that kind of outlined a methodology for something called healing racial trauma protocol. And it is a structured, evidence-based treatment that is specifically designed for racialized individuals experiencing racial trauma symptoms. And the paper talks about so many things, like a lot of clinicians, so the people who are meant to be treating us, even the ones that have the best intentions that have gone out and done the work to be trauma-informed, to be racially informed, to understand equity, diversity, and inclusion and its impacts, to be able to understand the impacts of racism on those day-to-day interactions and on that wider scale, that systemic scale, it still doesn't change the fact that it needs to be addressed all the time. There cannot be a gap between what the community needs and what systems are training clinicians to do. And I do agree that things are getting better since 2020. After Black Lives Matter, I feel like it took a forefront of race and racism and made everybody look at it because we were sitting at home. We had no choice but to look at it. And no amount of how busy your life was means that you can ignore the fact that there is a history of race and racism in Canada, in the United States, in England, and it just exists, and we gotta do something about it. Man, sometimes this stuff is hard to talk about because it just feels like the problems are so much bigger than one person. But every day, and I and this is something I have to tell myself too, every day that I'm talking about this, every day that I'm challenging my own racism, and by that I mean subconscious, because I do try and not to be overtly racist, as do a lot of well-intentioned people, but that doesn't change the fact that subconsciously we have been absorbing racialized messages our whole lives. And even positive racial stereotypes like such and such race is very smart, such and such race is very athletic. Even that can have negative connotations for people. And subconsciously, people do have it ingrained in them. And it's up to us to be aware of the fact that no matter how good we feel we are, how much we want to educate ourselves on, we're still capable of making mistakes. And it we're still required to do the work and educate ourselves and challenge our own beliefs and challenge our misconceptions and challenge. Like, why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I think that? And it's just simply not a matter of you're a good person, a bad person, you're a racist or you're not a racist. It's a matter of acknowledging a problem and doing the work to solve that problem. Because we don't have to solve it in a day. But if you can challenge your own thinking, that's already a win. Whenever we think about race and trauma, I do feel like it can get a little bit doom and gloom. All right. I understand that. But I just want to share that something like systemat systemic change, like changing the whole world, making us all good and kumbaya and holding hands and resolving all these problems, that is the goal. All right, that is the goal. But we don't have to worry about doing it all all at once. And it also doesn't mean that because the change needed to solve a problem in its entirety is so much bigger than one person, it doesn't remove individual responsibility. So when we talk about something like individual therapy, and while it is valuable and necessary, it simply cannot be the primary solution to a systemic problem. If racism is hurting people every day and racial trauma exists and discrimination happens on such a subverted level, then we need to talk about that as well. Trauma-informed practice, especially applied at a systemic level, asks different questions. Not just how do we help this person heal, but what policies, institutions, structures keep producing this level of harm and what does it take to change them? Because racial bias isn't something that is ingrained in us. It's not like I wake up one day and I have all these ideas of stereotypes about different races. It's something that's taught, it's something that's shown. So, how do we create change so that newer generations aren't internalizing this subconscious bias based on race? So there's a question of research itself. For example, indigenous communities have raised a lot of really important concerns about being over-researched but without being properly compensated for being researched, having their experiences, their culture extracted for academic publication, but not really seeing that academic publication return the favor, where people find that, oh, I can do research on a certain population and apply for a certain grant. But what are you giving to that community as a thank you for using them? Even if you say that, oh, my research is gonna do a lot of good work for them. You still gotta think about what that direct impact is. It can't just all be wishful thinking, I'd say. I mean, research is something that's super important, but it does have to be equitable between researchers and community members. Something we gotta think about is that addressing racial health disparities, especially with mental health, also means addressing the root causes: housing, income, education, environmental safety, policing. The APA's framework on indigenous mental health notes that institutional racism worsens every social determinant of health. You can't medicate your way out of a structural problem. You can't medicate your way out of intergenerational trauma. You can't. It's just simply not possible. We need real systemic change from the top down to help make sure that it's not people of color who are having the worst health care outcomes. It's not people of color that are less likely to access mental health care. Just want to say hope is not lost. I know we've covered a lot of really heavy topics today and stuff that can feel like it is bigger than just one of us. And I just want to remind you that it's okay to feel heavy after a conversation like this. It's okay to feel down, it's okay to feel a little bit bummed out. And I just want to say that there is still a story of resilience alongside the rest of the topics of results, like talking about trauma, talking about uh discrimination, talking about poor healthcare outcomes when it comes to mental health. Just know that people have survived. The communities that we've talked about have faced genocide, enslavement, colonization, forced assimilation, mass incarceration, famine, and yet we're still here. You're still here, they're still here. We're still able to experience joy despite the hardships we've experienced, we're still able to feel belonging and connection. And life can be full of difficulties, but life is also full of joys. All right. And that's not nothing, the fact that throughout all these horrific historical experiences and currently horrific experiences of discrimination, people can still live and survive and have families and relationships and enjoy hobbies and find joy in the little things. And to be honest, like society and science is catching up. We've identified that trauma can be transmitted across generations. And so, why can't resilience, supportive environments, cultural connection, and intentional intervention can alter gene expression in healing directions? The science of repair, the science of resilience is very real, let me tell you. And there is hope. There's new generations of people going into healthcare who are informed, who are intentional, who are challenging subconscious beliefs of racism. There is an old guard that may not have necessarily prioritized this type of learning, but there is a new guard that is on its way to taking positions of power and creating the change that we need to see in order to live happy and healthy lives. And remember that the research that's there isn't perfect and has harmed people, and honestly, is again not perfect. It's catching up, but it's growing. We have people who are South Asian leading South Asian research. We have people who are black leading black research, we have people who are indigenous leading indigenous research, we have people who belong to the communities working for those communities on a policy level and a research level. And that overall will create change. And if you're someone carrying racial trauma, whether it's been identified as that or not, I want you to know that what you're experiencing has a name and there is science and validity to it, and there are people who are working to better the psychological field and build tools and create places where you can go to talk about it. And your healing process and the pain that has put you here is all valid and you matter. If you're someone who feels that they have the power to create a little bit of change for the good today, I recommend doing it. Go be nice to someone, challenge some existing beliefs you have, challenge a family member when they make a racist comment, challenge a friend when they're still using the N-word in the year of our Lord 2026 and they're grown and literally like 30. Challenge them. All right, we're in a place where we know better, so we're in a place where we can do better. I hope you've all enjoyed today's well-being Wednesday. We've covered a lot of ground and honestly have had so much fun. I hope you enjoyed it as well. Enjoy your Wednesday, folks. Talk to you later. Thank you for tuning in. This has been such a topic that is close to heart. It's something that I just have so much fun talking about, and it's something I feel very informed in and love to share with people because I think it's important to talk about. So thank you for tuning in. You can stay up to date with our podcasts on our socials at the Universal Radio, and you can stream us wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Gridit, and keep turning it up with us.