Consider This from NPR - Experts Call The Pandemic A Collective Trauma. Why Don't We Talk About It That Way?

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

When we talk about the pandemic, we talk about stress. Burnout. Uncertainty. Isolation. We don't talk as much about trauma. But a growing number of mental health professionals say that's what people are experiencing as the pandemic drags on — and we may need a new way to talk about what they're going through. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf reports. Psychiatrist, neurologist and author Bessel van der Kolk explains how the brain processes and recovers from trauma. His 2004 book The Body Keeps the Score surged to the top of bestseller lists during the pandemic. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Back at the start of 2020, two years ago, Julie Hogan was on the list for a kidney transplant. And that February, she got the call there was a donor. I remember standing at my sink and thinking, what about this virus? Like, is this going to be a problem? But it was a rare opportunity that wasn't going to come around again. She said yes to the transplant. And the day I was discharged was the day the country shut down. She is thankful for the transplant, but it left Julie severely immunocompromised. Even now, fully vaccinated

and boosted, she and her husband and college-age daughter all wear masks at home. They have to be extremely careful about who they see, what they do. We're trying to control for everything, and it's, you know, kind of impossible. Julie works from home. She rarely leaves the house, really only for lab tests. And when she does these days, it's incredibly stressful. I'm so nervous. Like my heart rate is through the roof when I'm out for anything. And I wonder, you know, like if I'm ever able to go out safely again and be normal and like go into a store, like, am I going to be feeling that forever? That kind of anxiety, viewing the world as unsafe, is often a symptom of trauma.

But Julie is conflicted calling it that. It doesn't fit the definition of trauma that she knows. There's no violence, no explosion, no assault. It seems harder than say, well, this is really traumatic because I have to stay home. But she says when she thinks about it, the past two years have felt traumatic. Her sense of safety in the world completely upended. It just feels hard to sort of accept that and, you know, well, what do you do about this kind of trauma? I mean, what do I do? Consider this. When we talk about the pandemic, we talk about stress, burnout, uncertainty,

isolation. We don't talk so much about trauma, but a growing number of mental health professionals say that is what people are experiencing as this pandemic drags on. And they say maybe we need a new way to talk about what we're going through. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, January 24th. Support comes from our 2022 lead sponsor of Consider This, the new Venture X card from Capital One. Earn 10x miles on hotels and rental cars and 5x miles on flights when you book through Capital One Travel. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing

things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. In a few moments, we'll talk to a psychiatrist and neuroscientist about how the brain processes trauma and recovers from it. The good news is, that's possible, but it might require reframing the problem. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf reports on the effort to do that when it comes to the pandemic. The word trauma gets thrown around a lot these days,

but generally speaking, trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event, usually an event that threatens your life or the life of someone near you, and results in feelings of significant fear or helplessness. Think about that definition and then think about this pandemic. Does it apply? I have no difficulty calling this a trauma personally. Roxanne Cohen-Silver is a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. She's been studying collective trauma since the 1980s. Collective trauma is a stressful experience that is shared by many people. Think 9-11, a mass shooting, a natural disaster. The event happens, there's great tragedy,

and people pick up the pieces of their lives. This pandemic, though, it's different. There isn't a singular event. This has been a slow-moving disaster with not even a clear start, certainly no obvious end point. And it has escalated in intensity over time. So it is very, very different. It makes it harder to categorize. I was just a wreck. You know, I was an absolute wreck every minute of every day. 42-year-old Lanny Langstrom lives in Utah with his family.

The early months of the pandemic for him were really just an anxious blur. I was desperately trying to stay away from, like, this thing that I thought was going to kill me at any second. He remembers worrying that if he died from COVID, his six-year-old daughter might not remember him. He was so stressed out, he eventually called a mental health hotline, and they suggested he seek therapy, something he'd never done before. My therapist pretty early on, actually,

talked about my symptoms as being, like, actually like what trauma victims experience. Lanny was surprised. When I think of trauma, you know, I more imagine, you know, one of these brave young men that go over to Afghanistan and they're driving a Humvee and it gets blown up. He says he almost felt guilty calling his experience in the pandemic, one where he has not gotten sick, traumatic. Certainly I'm not a warrior, you know, like I'm not a soldier,

but at this point we've experienced like 800,000 people dying, you know. His therapist helped him realize that lots of people were reacting to the pandemic like he was. We absolutely are experiencing a mental health tsunami. Dr. Arthur Evans is CEO of the American Psychological Association. A survey by his organization found a significant increase in the demand for mental health treatment last year. That's on top of another big increase in 2020. And we expect that it will grow even more next year. So we haven't even crested this tsunami yet.

Providers are stretched thin. Wait lists are growing. People are reaching out for a myriad of problems, he says. But anxiety, depression and other trauma-related disorders are at the top. Evans says he's all for talking about this pandemic in terms of trauma, especially because it can help de-stigmatize what so many people are experiencing. I think for a lot of people, the idea of having a mental health challenge is there's something wrong with me. And I think what the idea of trauma helps people to understand is that, no, this is something that is happening to me and how I'm responding is a natural response. But experts

are quick to point out that trauma research has shown that the mental health effects usually present later, months, sometimes years after an event. Tamara Rodney is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. She says she's already seeing the signs in some of her patients, maybe not all the symptoms, but some. But that doesn't mean that because it didn't hit clinical significance, we shouldn't be paying attention to it. She says right now, especially as the pandemic drags on, we need to be paying attention to the warning signs. Irritability, trouble sleeping, drinking more than usual, fatigue, loss of joy. We want to, say, address the symptoms as they come.

We do not need to get to full-blown depression or anxiety or PTSD before we deal with it. Dr. Evans agrees, especially because right now there just isn't enough treatment to go around. We can't treat our way out of this. The magnitude of the problem is too large. We've got to check in with ourselves, with friends, families, strangers. After nearly two years of being told to isolate, it's more important than ever to reach out. Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News. So many questions raised by that reporting questions i want to put now to dr bessel vanderkolk he's a psychiatrist neurologist and author his book the body keeps the score is all

about the brain and the healing of trauma now this book published eight years ago, 2014. But last year, in the midst of the pandemic, it topped the New York Times bestseller list for months. It was one of the most sold books on Amazon last year. And I will tell you, at my local library right now, there's a huge wait list, which for a challenging and technical account of trauma, seems to say something about how we might be feeling as a society. Bessel van der Kolk, welcome. Hi, good to be here. Thank you. What do you make of the popularity of your book right now? I'm astounded by it. It's a very difficult book to read.

Well, I mean, is it a stretch to say this may be something to do with how people are feeling in this moment, trying to figure out, is what I feel trauma? And that, you know, maybe what we hope would be an unusual and extraordinary experience, trauma, is not so unusual at the moment. So when we first defined PTSD, the preamble was, this is an experience outside of the realm of usual human experience. And boy, were we blind and dumb calling it like this because trauma is ubiquitous. And that's why I'm a little bit worried about everything being called a trauma because we need to be very precise

because if we don't know what we're treating, we may give the wrong treatment. So to call this thing a collective trauma, my reaction is, yeah, not for me. Not for you. I'm settled in my life. I have friends. I'm involved in projects.

I'm fine. Your argument would be that what most of us are experiencing in this pandemic is not trauma. Is it traumatic? I mean, you wouldn't argue with the idea that this is deeply affecting people. It's deeply affecting all of us on a very important level. What do we miss? We miss understanding what the future will bring to us. A very important part of mental functioning is,

oh, next week we'll do that. I'll see you in a few weeks. And being able to have time in your life and a sculpture of your life and that's gone none of us can make plans for the future because we don't know what's going to happen that is different and another important definition of trauma is that even after the threat is over you continue to feel that threat i'm not sure that's true for most of us. When last June, it looked like COVID was coming to an end, I and many other people I know that love socializing, and all the traces were more or less gone because the pleasure of being with people makes you very quickly forget

how awful it was. Is it possible we don't have a word for what this is, that we need a new word for what this is and how it is affecting us? Yeah, that's really what I'm encouraging us to do. And I'm actually working on it with some people to really identify what is making us all feel like we're barely hanging on. Maybe the threat of COVID, maybe the isolation, not being able to feel safe with other people. The moment you meet somebody right now, you go, will this person infect me or not? maybe the isolation, not being able to feel safe with other people. The moment you meet somebody right now, you go,

will this person infect me or not? That is so against our private nature. Our private nature is to hug people and to relax with other people and all these things that make you feel alive and safe. A lot of those elements are not there right now. But it's much more than actually a traumatic event. Let's just deal with the memory of that event and you'll feel much better. No, there's an ongoing stress.

And we don't know who, when the stress is over, will have permanent effects and who won't. Yeah, it's a double whammy, isn't it? The not knowing that this is ever going to end or when, and that even the people who should bring us solace are a threat. Exactly. It is very painful. And a lot of us are very upset a good amount of the time, and that may express itself in our relationships with our partners, with our kids, with their parents, that we are more irritable, but we're also more grateful

for human contact. Well, that prompts to where I think I would love to end with you, which is what can we do as we are living through this and yet needing to heal and find our way to something resembling a healthy, normal life? It's important to really do an inventory about how are you coping with the trauma? How has your life changed? What's been difficult for you? And indeed, it's likely that people are drinking much more, they're drugging much more, they may become much more irritable. All these things may compound your life.

But I think, of course, what makes people feel good about being alive is having human contacts and feeling appreciated, safe, and feeling vit, safe, and feeling vitally connected with other people. A very core issue of recovery or dealing with trauma is moving together, dancing together, singing together, some sort of rhythmical engagement with the people around you. So hopefully you have a body with whom you go hiking

and who it's safe to be with. But you have to do something and feel that organism that you live in that is actually doing things and engaging with the world around it. And that's much more challenging for all of us. That is Bessel van der Kolk, founder and medical director of the Trauma Research Foundation in Massachusetts. He's a professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School and the author of the book, The Body Keeps the Score. Dr. van der Kolk, thank you. Thank you very much.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.