Illegal Evictions Linked to Severe Anxiety in Black Women, Major Study Finds

Being forced out of a home without a court order may leave a mark far deeper than the loss of housing itself. A large mixed-methods study of Black women in Michigan has found that those who experienced an illegal eviction within the past two years faced nearly fifty percent higher risk of severe generalized anxiety disorder symptoms compared with women who had never been illegally evicted. The research, conducted by the Social Epidemiology to Combat Unjust Residential Evictions (SECURE) Study team and published in SSM – Mental Health, is among the first to disentangle court-ordered evictions from extralegal ones and to measure their distinct associations with mental health in a population that has long been overlooked by housing and psychiatric research.

Generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, is characterized by excessive, difficult-to-control worry that interferes with daily functioning. Rates of anxiety have been rising in the United States, particularly among adults under fifty and among women, whose risk exceeds that of men. Worsening mental health among pregnant and parenting women of low socioeconomic status has raised alarms in the maternal health community, because untreated anxiety threatens both mothers and children. Yet scientists have struggled to identify modifiable, upstream drivers of anxiety in marginalized groups, and research explicitly linking manifestations of structural racism to GAD has remained rare. The SECURE investigators argued that residential eviction, which disproportionately affects Black women and children, is one such discernible consequence of structural racism, and that the specific experiences of Black women have been largely absent from the scientific record, a gap the researchers attribute in part to misogynoir, or the systematic dismissal of Black women’s testimony.

The SECURE Study recruited self-identified Black women aged eighteen to forty-five who were parents or had a parenting role and lived in Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb counties in Michigan. Between July 2021 and July 2024, participants completed online or telephone surveys, yielding a final sample of 1,428 women, a remarkable 91.1 percent response rate among confirmed eligible participants. Crucially, the study was designed as participatory action research: a Community Advisory Board of Black women local, national, and international leaders helped shape the survey questions in culturally appropriate language, interpreted the findings, and are named coauthors on the paper. This structure was not merely symbolic; it shaped how eviction itself was measured, distinguishing five separate exposures: eviction during childhood, ever experiencing a court-ordered eviction, ever experiencing an illegal eviction, a court-ordered eviction in the past two years, and an illegal eviction in the past two years.

In Michigan, a lawful eviction requires written notice of a lease violation, a court filing, a judicial eviction order, and a physical removal carried out by a court officer or sheriff. An illegal eviction bypasses all of these protections: the landlord or their representative simply forces a resident out. Anxieties were assessed with the GAD-7, a validated seven-item scale on which participants rated how often they were bothered by symptoms such as nervousness, uncontrollable worrying, restlessness, irritability, and fear that something awful might happen. The scale showed excellent internal consistency in this sample, and scores of fifteen or above, indicating severe symptoms, were analyzed as the outcome. Roughly one in three participants screened positive for moderate or severe anxiety symptoms in the previous two weeks, with about sixteen percent falling into the severe category.

The headline result emerged with striking clarity. In unadjusted analyses, all five eviction measures were associated with elevated risk of severe anxiety symptoms, with relative risks ranging from roughly 1.3 to 2.0. After statistical adjustment for age, income, marital status, education, employment, enrollment year, current housing tenure, and prior clinician-diagnosed anxiety and depression, most associations attenuated. But one held firm: women who reported an illegal eviction in the past two years had 46 percent higher risk of severe GAD symptoms than women with no such experience, a finding that remained statistically significant with a confidence interval of 1.03 to 2.07. A sensitivity analysis comparing women illegally evicted more than two years earlier against those with no lifetime history found no elevated risk, while recent illegal eviction conferred fifty-two percent higher risk, sharpening the picture of a potent, time-sensitive association that resembles an acute threat response rather than a lasting scar of past displacement.

The study’s design cannot prove causation, and the authors are careful on this point, acknowledging possible recall bias and the cross-sectional nature of the data. Yet they argue the estimate is likely conservative, given that half of the sample reported some eviction experience, that prior mental health diagnoses may themselves lie on the pathway between eviction and anxiety, and that self-report is the only feasible way to measure illegal eviction, since such displacements never enter court records. Notably, the researchers found no evidence that Black women are more likely to misremember major life events than other groups, undermining a common methodological objection to within-group research built on lived experience.

The qualitative arm of the study adds the texture that numbers alone cannot supply. Of the ninety-five women reporting a recent illegal eviction, seventy-seven also answered open-ended questions about why they were put out and what their landlords did. Thematic analysis of their responses revealed seven recurring themes. Reasons for illegal eviction included landlord conflict, abuse, and fraud, such as retaliation against tenants who filed discrimination complaints or who knew their rights; landlord neglect, including refusal to repair infestations and dangerous conditions; gentrification, property sales, and unaffordable rent increases; and family or neighborhood conflict. One participant described being deceived by a landlord who ‘came and lied to the police to remove us’ after a court had failed to displace her. Another, seven days late on rent, received a fraudulent notice that mimicked a court document and left within a week, unaware she had a right to stay.

The methods of displacement were often overtly coercive, fitting what researchers call ‘self-help’ eviction: changing the locks while tenants were away, shutting off water and utilities, removing belongings to the street, sending threats by text and email, calling police with false reports, and arriving with groups of people to intimidate. Participants described daily harassment, destroyed property, and inspections they could not refuse. The authors contend that such experiences produce exactly the cognitive conditions that sustain generalized anxiety: anticipatory worry, hypervigilance, an inability to plan, and a pervasive sense of ongoing threat. Because illegal evictions are sudden, violent, unpredictable, and offer no immediate legal recourse, they may generate an intolerable level of uncertainty, a known driver of GAD. The researchers go further, framing the incomplete enforcement of tenant protections as a form of state-sanctioned violence, and drawing a parallel to police brutality, which has likewise been linked to hypervigilance and anxiety in Black communities.

The implications reach well beyond psychology clinics. More than one in three participants carried a prior diagnosis of anxiety or depression, and even after adjusting for those diagnoses, the association between recent illegal eviction and severe symptoms remained strong. People with GAD face elevated risks of additional mental and physical health conditions, and identifying modifiable upstream causes is therefore a public health priority. The authors argue that addressing the dual crises of eviction and poor mental health among reproductive-age Black women is essential to maternal and child health equity, and they call for a layered response: emergency support and mutual aid for those experiencing illegal eviction, trauma-informed interventions, stronger enforcement of tenant rights, and structural solutions including policy change and government-funded reparations for descendants of enslaved people in the United States. As the first and most comprehensive study of its kind, built with rather than merely about the women it studied, the SECURE investigation transforms a largely invisible form of housing violence into measurable scientific evidence, and sends a clear signal that where eviction law ends and landlord whim begins, the mental health consequences are anything but abstract.

Subject of Research: Associations between illegal residential eviction and severe generalized anxiety disorder symptoms among reproductive-age Black women

Article Title: Illegal eviction and risk of severe anxiety disorder symptoms: Qualitative and quantitative data from the Social Epidemiology to Combat Unjust Residential Evictions (SECURE) study

Article References: Sealy-Jefferson, S., Ross, L. J., Mishra, S., Sanders, K., Anderson, T., Anderson-Mays, T., Oneal, R., & Jones-McBryde, C. (2026). Illegal eviction and risk of severe anxiety disorder symptoms: Qualitative and quantitative data from the Social Epidemiology to Combat Unjust Residential Evictions (SECURE) study. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100699

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100699

Keywords: illegal eviction, generalized anxiety disorder, Black women, structural racism, housing instability, maternal health, SECURE study, GAD-7, self-help eviction, tenant rights, reproductive justice, Michigan