Mark

Unfortunately, we are up against a trend of isolation. There is a group of five or six people and they are all on their phones. Texting someone else. They are not even looking at one another.  It is quite sad. In terms of mentorships (especially in the Black community), they only exist if you have a lot of athletic skills. You might find a mentor who is a surrogate father figure if you are gifted athletically. But this is only a fraction of that cohort that has that talent. More often it is the street that offers opportunity. Are you going to work for 8 dollars an hour or are you going to be a drug dealer?

Perry

You know, even if you are more fortunate, both parents have to be working day and night to put food on the table.  A lot of support under those circumstances is hard to come by.

Bill

Mitch, what are your own thoughts and reactions to what Mark has been presenting?

Mitch

This is a complicated subject. We have a sense that allostatic load does exist.  We have a sense ourselves that we have too high a allostatic load.  We know the things that load us—so we are looking for a metric that can measure that load.  It is hard to see how racism could not be a part of that load.  So, it makes sense to me.  What I really liked is the offset.  You don’t need much to offload some of that allostatic load that takes you on a course that ruins your health, that make life seem so miserable.  It takes a couple of people investing in your life that can make the difference.  That is encouraging. I’ve not heard that before.

Perry

I think probably thirty years ago I recall getting into this subject.  I came across something recently that suggests we have been working a long time in developing metrics regarding how stressed we are.  The death of a parent, that kind of stuff. But I came up with something thirty years ago or more that was called a Hardiness Index.  It was sort of the opposite of the Stress inventories.  People who scored high on this Hardiness Index coped with stress much better than us regular folks.  Those administering the Hardiness Index made the point that there are people who actually thrive on something that would be terribly stressful for the rest of us. These are people like court attorneys who like to argue in court.  They tend to have, as a population, very high Hardiness Index scores.  Mark, you’re looking for metrics. Certainly, the biometric ones are things that are helpful because you can’t cheat on the tests.  However, I wonder Bill. Have you come up with anything like that in your sphere of psychology?