Trauma and the pandemic

Covid has traumatized the U.S. Dr. Diane Meier, the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care in New York, discussed what is needed to heal with our Talk columnist. Here’s an excerpt.

Has the pandemic affected our collective attitude toward grief?

There are many shadow pandemics. One is the trauma to the entire health profession during this last year. The other trauma is the roughly 10 people for every person who has died from Covid who are grieving. That’s over five million people. That is a shadow pandemic that will be with us long after we get the virus under control. Our current president has worked hard to begin to address that through the ritual ceremonies to remember the dead and honor them, and he has talked a lot about his own losses, to normalize talking about losses and how they’re with you every day. That’s important. We need other people to do it, too.

Can you tease out the link you suggested earlier between trauma and killing the other?

The analogy is post-traumatic stress disorder: an overreaction to new traumas because the prior traumas were never addressed, never expressed, never worked through. So everything that happens re-triggers it. There’s a book called “The Body Keeps the Score,” and that’s what it’s about: Things that happened to you years ago don’t ever go away. They are embedded in your mind and body and inform how you react to things that happen today.
The New York Times