“I don’t feel that we’re doomed,” Silver told me. “I do still believe that we will get through this.” She and other experts I talked with noted that people are resilient, and often more so than they realize. But they also agreed that the rhetoric of individual resilience can often be used to plaster over institutional failures: the shortage of mental-health-care providers, the labyrinthine insurance system, the lack of support from employers, the stigma around seeking care at all, and the societal tendency to bottle grief. “I don’t know anyone who looks to the U.S. as a model for grieving and mourning,” Lipsky told me. “We don’t talk about loss. By and large, it’s all about consumption to help numb you out.”
Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me that recovery from disasters is usually gauged in terms of dollars regained, jobs restored, and infrastructure rebuilt. Mental health is harder to measure, and so easier to ignore. She is worried that the understandable societal desire to move past the pandemic will further alienate people who are still dealing with grief or symptoms. “What if someone is truly suffering and reaches out for help six months from now, and is told, ‘What are you talking about? The pandemic was ages ago’?” Peek said.
Loss can linger longer than expected. The time frame for recovering from disasters “is measured not in months, but in years or decades,” Peek said. In many cases, it lasts beyond the life span of human compassion. In late 2005, the people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina initially found an outpouring of support, including meals, clothes, furniture, money, and music. But by early 2006, goodwill gave way to what disaster-relief workers called Katrina fatigue, and what the evacuees just called discrimination. “People were like, ‘Aren’t these people going home?’” Peek said. “And they had no homes.”
Similar tendencies are apparent now, as commentators wonder why many Americans are still anxious and risk averse, even as the U.S. begins to wake from its pandemic nightmare. “I think some people believe we pressed ‘pause,’ and we’ll go back to the way things were before, as if we didn’t have all the intervening experiences, as if 2020 didn’t happen, as if getting a vaccine erases your memory,” Gold said.
Consider the latest phase of the ceaseless discourse around masks. The SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads primarily through shared indoor air, the vaccines are extremely effective, and breakthrough infections among vaccinated people are rare. It is reasonable, then, for the CDC to advise that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks outdoors. (The agency’s surprising move to extend those guidelines indoors is more debatable.)
But it is also reasonable for people to want to continue wearing masks, to feel anxious that others might now decide not to, or to be dubious that strangers will be honest about their vaccination status. People don’t make decisions about the present in a temporal vacuum. They integrate across their past experiences. They learn. Some have learned that the CDC can be slow in its assessment of evidence, or confusing in its proclamations. They watched their fellow citizens rail against steps that would protect one another from infections at a time when the U.S. had already weathered decades of eroding social trust. They internalized the lessons of a year in which they had to fend for themselves, absent support from a government that repeatedly downplayed a crisis that was evidently unfolding. “We had no other protections all year,” Gold said. “We had masks. No one else protected us. It’s understandable that people would be hesitant about taking them off.”
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source https://earn8online.com/index.php/273196/the-pandemics-trauma-wont-just-go-away/
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