health--wellness
You Can Get through This Dark Pandemic Winter Using…
by Melinda Wenner Moyer, a contributing editor at Scientific American
Amy Nitza has spent decades helping people in crisis. The director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz has traveled to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, to Botswana during an HIV crisis and to Haiti to help traumatized children forced into domestic servitude.
But the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitza says, is different. It keeps coming at people month after month as loved ones get sick or die, as jobs are lost, and as the actions taken to avoid infection—such as isolation from family—cause intense emotional pain and stress. As of December 2020, more than 1.6 million people around the globe have died from the coronavirus. Grief, fear and economic hardship have hit every nation. In the U.S. the numbers have been overwhelming: more than 300,000 people have died, and about 17 million have been infected with the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Usually disasters have survivors and responders, Nitza says, but COVID is so widespread that people are both of those things at once. “We’re training everybody [on] how to take care of themselves and how to support the people around them,” she says.
The upcoming winter looks especially dark and hard as deaths climb to exceed the losses of 9/11 every day. As soon as we hear that outbreaks are receding, they rise back up again like storm-tossed seas. Perhaps the toughest part is that no one knows when the pandemic will end or whether the future will look anything like the past. Vaccines are here for some health-care workers and nursing-home residents, but for most of us, they are still months away. At the moment, many hospitals are overwhelmed with waves of new COVID patients. “We as a nation have never been in anything like this,” says Charles Figley, who has worked in disaster psychology for 40 years and is director of the Traumatology Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans.
The stresses are taking a terrible toll on our country’s mental health. In June researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 5,412 U.S. adults and found that 25.5 percent had symptoms of anxiety and 24.3 percent had symptoms of depression—a threefold and fourfold increase, respectively, from 2019. It is “a staggering number,” says Susan Borja, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Dimensional Traumatic Stress Research Program. In a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers at the City University of New York and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surveyed 5,250 U.S. adults in April 2020 and found that 35 percent were experiencing moderate or severe anxiety symptoms. Those who had recently lost income were doing extremely poorly.
The pains of the pandemic and its consequences are sharpest among people of color, who are “more exposed and less protected,” in the words of physician Camara Phyllis Jones, who studies health inequities. In November 2020 unemployment rates among Black and Hispanic workers were 75 and 42 percent higher, respectively, than that among white workers. Compared with white households, many more Black and Hispanic households are struggling with food insecurity, and nonwhite children are more likely to be learning remotely from home rather than in person at school. These hardships fall on top of the direct agonies inflicted by the disease: In a study published in July 2020, New York University researchers found that in urban U.S. counties where the population was substantially nonwhite, the COVID death rate was nearly 10 times higher than it was in predominantly white counties with the same median income. Among Native Americans, another less protected group, the death rate during the first half of 2020 was nearly twice that among white people.
Read more “You Can Get through This Dark Pandemic Winter Using Tips from Disaster Psychology”
