In the inner city, a health problem is making it harder for young people to learn. The Centers for Disease Control said 30 percent of inner city kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Wendy Tokuda reports.
A report recently issued by the Centers for Disease Control has indicated a startling discovery. Inner city youth suffer from a unique form of “post- traumatic stress disorder” which the CDC researchers refer to as hood disease. The researchers have stated that inner city kids live in a war zone that they can never leave. Because of this, many kids have adopted attitudes and behavior similar to combat veterans and survivors of conflict zones.
San Francisco State University researcher Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Ph.D., stated to CBS, “You could take anyone who is experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, and the things we are currently emphasizing in school will fall off their radar. Because frankly, it does not matter in our biology if we don’t survive the walk home.”
The amount of shootings and murders are startling. In East Oakland, California alone there were 59 murders; nearly 2/3 of the city of Oakland’s murder totals are clustered in that in one area. Teachers at Freemont High School in East Oakland report that kids walk around with laminated funeral cards of those killed around their necks. This behavior is similar to soldiers who often wear the dog tags of fallen comrades.
The CDC study goes on to state that nearly 30 percent of inner city youth suffer from hood disease, which is compounded by inner city poverty and violence.
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