Short Wave - The Pandemic Is Damaging Health Workers' Mental Health

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

A recent study found that working surge after surge in the pandemic, a majority of American health care workers experienced psychiatric symptoms — including depression and thoughts of suicide. And yet, mental health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee found that very few got help for these symptoms.If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Or text the word home to 741741.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with Ritu Chatterjee and Pierre's mental health correspondent. Ritu, you have been looking into the mental health toll of this pandemic. I have. Yeah, and specifically the toll these last two years has taken on the mental health and well-being of nurses. Yes, and hi, Emily. So, you know, I have been following the impact of the pandemic on various groups of people. including frontline healthcare workers,

who have kept working without a break, surge after surge through countless deaths, endless staffing shortages, which reach crisis levels in the past year. And you might remember that last year I did an episode on this pod on how many of these frontline providers are burned out and exhausted. But after two years of this pandemic, they are more than burnt out.

They are experiencing psychiatric symptoms. A recent study found that a majority of American healthcare workers report symptoms that include depression and thoughts of suicide. And a note to listeners is that we will be talking about suicide in this episode. You and I have talked about suicide prevention on this show before. It's something everyone on our team on the science desk cares very much about. And we want to say outright that if you or someone you know is considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention. Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the word home to 741-741. Because we know that people who do reach out for help and connect to somebody feel better.

Yeah. You know, mental health crises, they can build slowly and then reveal themselves all at once. And when they do, it can be really hard to talk about, especially if you're the person struggling. So how did you find nurses willing to be open and do that? discuss this. Yeah, so it is hard to talk about, and we know that doctors and nurses can be particularly reluctant to talk openly about their mental health, and often they don't get the care they need to address their symptoms. Something happened this January, which changed that. A traveling ICU nurse working in California's Bay Area went missing. That became a wake-up call

for other nurses to address this growing mental health crisis. So today on the show, how nurses responded with one of their own went missing. And the role that some say hospitals should be taking to support nurses on the front lines. You're listening to Shorewave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Joshua Paredes knew his friend Michael O'Dell was struggling. Michael had worked as an ICU nurse during the pandemic, moving between stints at hospitals in California and Minnesota. Joshua, who's also a nurse, says it's not that his friend complained about anything, but... The stories that he told me that I kind of really started to notice that he's struggling.

Like having to ask family members of vulnerable patients to leave. I don't know if you've ever had to try to kick out one of those family members, but it's not easy. I have. It's a hard thing to tell somebody you need to leave, and that takes a toll. He says Michael also talked about having to watch so many patients die alone. He was these patients, everything. He was there when they're dying, which is what we do. It's what we do, but it's not something we do every day all day. Something we're not stealing up body bags every day. And that's what the last couple years have been like.

And then Michael suffered two big personal losses last year. He and his boyfriend split up, and his mother died. He was in Minnesota at the time and getting treated for depression. Joshua didn't want his friend to be alone at such a vulnerable time. So basically, I was just like, come to San Francisco. So last November, Michael moved in with Joshua and started a stint at Stanford Health. He seemed to be coping okay, but then on the morning of January 18th, when Joshua came home from work around 7.30, Michael wasn't there. When he didn't respond to text

messages and didn't answer his calls, Joshua called Michael's workplace. That's when he learned that his friend had left the ICU sometime around 4 a.m. to get something from his car. But he never came back. John LeBlanc is a nurse and a close friend of Michael's. When I found out that he left mid-shift, my first thought was he's in crisis because it's totally completely out of character for him. Two days later, the authorities found Michael's body. While the investigation into his death is still ongoing, his friends think he died by suicide. It was a shock and it's still kind of, you know, it's still something we're grappling with. Michael's death has reverberated throughout the nursing community. Again, his friend Joshua Pett.

it is. There's the people that reached out to me that I don't even know, that didn't know Michael, that just want me to know, like, I worked on this unit, I experienced this. One person told me his coworkers had to wheel him to the emergency room from the ICU at that hospital because he was having a breakdown. A study found that over 70% of healthcare workers in the United States are struggling with symptoms of depression and anxiety, nearly 40% with symptoms of PTSD. But, Joshua says, We don't want to talk about it. You know, we have a lot of shame involved in it.

But word of Michael's disappearance and then his death seemed to break that wall of silence. It felt personal to healthcare workers, like Nurse Sarah Warren in Florida. It's only a matter of time before this happens to another nurse. Sarah's had her own mental health struggles after working with COVID patients. I'd actually forgotten large pieces of 2020.

and I had to speak to a therapist about this. And they told me that I most likely was suffering from symptoms of PTSD. Sarah didn't know Michael, but after she learned about his death, she connected with his close friends. They all wanted to take their grief and turn it into action to address their colleagues' mental health needs. We're in the process of hopefully creating a mental health movement dedicated to his memory, but also to those nurses that we've lost not only in the last two years, but in the last few decades. She says nurses have long been at a higher risk of suicide than the general population.

She and Michael's friends want to change that. They know it's a huge task and one that requires big investments from hospitals and lawmakers. But they also want to support nurses as soon as possible. Doctors have a dedicated crisis number they can call. They realized it was time that nurses and certified nursing assistants or CNAs had a number to call too. Our goal is to create a, you know, peer-to-peer support line, almost like we're saving ourselves, where nurses and CNAs would be able to call a phone number and receive a listening ear, and it's someone who knows what they're going through.

When a nonprofit that supports military veterans heard about this idea, they jumped on board to help. Sean Dalgarn is the executive director of growing veterans, which trains vets to provide emotional and informational help to their peers. Peer support is meeting people where they're at, being a good listener, being a shoulder to lean on. A peer support specialist is someone recovering from a mental illness, so they have the lived experience to support others with similar struggles. Studies have found widespread benefits from improvements and symptoms to making people more hopeful. Dalgarn says it's an effective early intervention. So if you're able to access people in an early stage,

of whatever they're experiencing, then that's a crucial catch. You have to be able to dress this at the lowest level before it becomes something that can unfortunately lead to suicide. Suicide prevention is a key focus for the new hotline for nurses. Michael O'Dell's friend John LeBlanc says it's why they're calling their project, don't clock out. The idea behind it is don't clock out of life, you know? It may take a while to launch this crisis line,

but already about 250 healthcare workers have signed up to provide support to their colleagues. We want nurses to realize that you're not alone. You don't have to check out early. You know, we're here to talk to you before you take those last drastic steps. This is such a powerful, unnecessary message amid what is happening to? nurses in this country. I'm thinking about what you said in the piece, Reto, that in the study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, over 70% of health care workers in the U.S. are struggling with symptoms of depression and anxiety. And nearly 40% with symptoms of PTSD.

These are massive proportions. So what is the responsibility of hospitals in all of this, given the mental health crisis? That's a very good question, Emily. because many doctors, nurses, and even mental health care providers think that the healthcare industry should do more to help their profession deal with not just the fallout of the pandemic, but also long-standing systemic problems like staffing shortages, which have only worsened in the past couple of years. So I talked to Kathy Stomberg.

She's the vice president of the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement, or Corona. That's the Labor Union representing nurses at Stanford and Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. hospitals. And here's what she said Michael's death really meant to her and her colleagues. I think for a lot of people, it was kind of an aha moment. He had to have been suffering a lot to get to the point where not only wanting to take his own life, but reaching the point where he abandoned his job in the middle of a shift. And that has to have been some really significant anguish. And her union has been negotiating for a contract that would lessen the burden on nurses and improve

access to mental health care. They've asked for a special bank of funds to allow nurses to spend up to 2,000 a year on mental health to cover out-of-pocket expenses, which can and often does deter people from seeking care. And they also want improvements to the employee assistance program that would cut the weeks long wait time. for appointments and to address the long-standing staffing shortages that have really reached unsustainable levels during the pandemic and significantly worsened burnout and mental health symptoms among those on the front lines. And how has this particular hospital, Stanford and Lucille Packard Children's Hospitals, responded? So the union says they've had 30 negotiating sessions. Stomberg told me that most proposals have been rejected.

and the hospitals haven't acknowledged how short-staffed they are. They don't want to acknowledge that relying on travel nurses and staff nurses working over time shifts isn't sustainable. And I also reached out to Stanford, and in an email, Stanford Healthcare spokesperson Julie Gracius told me that, quote, we are committed to working with the union to reach mutually acceptable agreements our nurses can be proud of in support. But Joshua Paradis, Michael O'Dell's friend and roommate, who used to once work at Stanford, isn't convinced that the hospital is doing enough to help nurses and other frontline providers struggling with stress and psychiatric symptoms. In fact, the old contract that these nurses had been working on at these two hospitals

expired on March 31st, and the union has asked for a federal mediator for ongoing negotiations. And the vast majority of union members, Emily, just recently voted for the union to go on strike. Wow. It's really escalating. Yeah, it is. And Paradis, who's closely following all of this, says the problem really needs serious investments and efforts by hospitals and the healthcare industry. Ritu, thank you so much for bringing us this story and just this conversation forward. My pleasure, Emily. This story was edited for radio by Rebecca Davis and produced by Mark Rivers.

For Shortwave, it was produced by Rebecca Ramirez and edited by Giselle Grayson, who is our senior supervising editor. Neil Carruth is our senior director of On-demand news programming, and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave. The Daily Science podcast from NPR.