Racism and Mental Health: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

Racism across interpersonal, online, institutional, and structural forms is repeatedly linked to depression, anxiety, distress, suicidality, and PTSD symptoms.

Chronic discrimination showed higher common mental disorder risk than past exposure, and child inequity models suggested large preventable harms.

Racism exposure should be assessed as part of trauma-informed, perinatal, adolescent, and adult mental health care rather than treated as background context.

Prospective and child-development studies suggest repeated or early racism exposure can shape later emotional, behavioral, and psychological outcomes.

Vigilance, sleep disturbance, physiological arousal, inflammatory reactivity, and allostatic burden appear to connect racism with mental health trajectories.

Racism scales, racial-trauma recognition, anti-racism curricula, decolonizing care, and anti-oppression service models show translational promise.

The evidence points beyond individual coping toward schools, campuses, housing, policing, healthcare access, and institutional accountability.

Fear of discrimination, mistrust, language barriers, and culturally unsafe care remain major barriers to mental health service engagement.

Protective factors and interventions are promising but unevenly tested; stronger longitudinal, mechanistic, and structural intervention studies are needed.