Andrew Wooyoung Kim

ANDREW KIM, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was awarded a grant in April 2019 to aid research on “Biological Mechanisms of Generational Trauma and Resilience in Soweto, South Africa,” supervised by Dr. Christopher W. Kuzawa. South African society has continued to face the lingering sociopolitical impacts of the apartheid system despite its dissolution in 1994. Ongoing legacies of apartheid, including residential segregation, racialized class inequality, and everyday violence, have produced conditions of chronic psychosocial stress and trauma that pose major risks to mental health among historically marginalized communities. While researchers have focused on examining stress-based pathways that produce poor mental health, the possible amelioration of these life-course stress mechanisms due to coping and resilience is less known and vital for addressing the ongoing effects of historical trauma from apartheid. This study examined the effects of prenatal and childhood stress on later-life, adult mental health outcomes in a 30-year birth cohort study in Soweto and Johannesburg, South Africa, which began during the final years of the apartheid regime. This study overlapped with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and opportunistically assessed experiences during the national lockdown. Maternal prenatal stress in 1990 did not predict worse mental health in their adult children at age 30. Childhood adversity during the post-apartheid transition and COVID-19 psychosocial stress predicted worse PTSD symptoms in adults, and social support and coping buffered the psychiatric effects of both childhood adversity and COVID-19 stress.