There may be more to the story than the researcher's let on. They harp on the fact that:
Quote:
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"Our data show that the simplistic notion of a black-and-white world is no longer tenable," said Jackson, a senior research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world's largest academic survey and research organization.
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To make the correlation from having an active mental illness to causing a serious health disease (i.e. cardiovascular disease), which have been shown to be influenced by environmental stressors I my scientific expertise has definitely not been clearly proven.
If anything, this research is speculative.
The hard core evidence lies in the fact with numerous scientific studies done with animal models and genetic testing on human patients. But, the research is really slow.
The issue is that animal models, even if non-human primates, cannnot be readily asked how they feel. That has to be tested with behavioral studies that are at best interprative.
With genetic testing, the genes do not lie, but the actually onset of disease can be at best indeterminant--if at all. Nothing is life is guarenteed...
The research that this person has put out is making broad implications that cause the generation of "stereotypes". That African Americans cannot have depression because "XYZ" reason, therefore inappropriate treatment options of ill-informed health care administrators from HMO's will not pay for mental health treatments sorely needed in African American communities. Moreover, African Americans are already in a belabored healthcare system to begin with!!
When there is a P-value less than 0.005 that suggests that "Wolfram Syndrome", a form of type 2 diabetes strongly correlates with bipolar disorder and every research scientist in the field has access to this kind of knowledge suggests that communication between research departments that do not have clinical data, but a margin of error qualitative research, are clearly not being heard...
I can go on and on...