On October 24, 2019, Dr. Camilla Nonterah from the Department of Psychology gave a talk entitled “How Our World Shapes Our Health”. Dr. Nonterah began by outlining how humans have conceptualized health throughout history. Evolving from a belief in good and evil spirits and sorcery in the prehistoric period, today in the 21st Century we have a multifactorial biomedical and psychosomatic model. This idea of a multifactorial model is echoed by the World Health Organization’s proclamation that “the context of people’s lives determine their health”. This references social determinants of health, which are non-medical factors that affect one’s health and what Dr. Nonterah focused her talk on.
While this concept was not surprising to me as studies have shown how detrimental stress is to the body and how circumstances an individual often cannot control like their genetics, social status, and access to healthcare are all non-medical factors that affect a person’s health. However, Dr. Nonterah raised some other social determinants of health that I hadn’t previously considered, like race-related stress. Studies show how race-related stress negatively impacts health in a variety of ways. For example, early racial discrimination is associated with depressive symptoms and accelerates the aging process. Racial discrimination is also indirectly associated with alcoholism. Another surprising statistic showed that internalized racism is associated with a higher BMI. After discussing other social determinants of health, Dr. Nonterah emphasized the importance of a broader understanding of the effect policies have on health and a deeper understanding of biological pathways. This talk reinforced how complex and multidimensional health is and that you can’t always determine a person’s health just from looking at them.
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