How to heal the 'mass trauma' of Covid-19
Mar 25, 2021 16:00:30 GMT
Admin and flyingcarpet46 like this
Post by Chimera on Mar 25, 2021 16:00:30 GMT
[The Psychological Approaches sub-forum doesn't seem quite the right one in which to post this note, but nor does any other sub-forum. See General mental health discussion?]
Ed Prideaux, How to heal the 'mass trauma' of Covid-19 - BBC Future [Thu 4 Feb 2021]
Just a few extracts, not focusing especially on COVID-19:
Ed Prideaux, How to heal the 'mass trauma' of Covid-19 - BBC Future [Thu 4 Feb 2021]
Just a few extracts, not focusing especially on COVID-19:
Trauma is a far subtler concept than many of us realise. It isn't just a word for something extremely stressful. It doesn't always come from short, sharp shocks like car accidents, terrorist attacks, or firefights. And, trauma isn't the same thing as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What trauma is about is events and their effect on the mind. But what separates it from something merely stressful is how we relate to these events on a deep level of belief.
[…]
Trauma can be understood as a rupture in "meaning-making", says David Trickey, a psychologist and representative of the UK Trauma Council. When "the way you see yourself, the way you see the world, and the way you see other people" are shocked and overturned by an event – and a gap arises between your "orienting systems" and that event – simple stress cascades into trauma, often-mediated through sustained and severe feelings of helplessness.
Even our most everyday tragedies stand as potential pits for trauma. Being fired from a job, for example, can be highly traumatic. One's identity, the foundation of a "personal GPS", is often tied to work and its execution. A job provides self-esteem, purpose and a social network, as well as comprising the activities of much of waking life. Being unexpectedly fired overturns this all. Stress accumulates and the nervous system is forced on high-alert.
One's mental resilience, the oil that churns our cognitive machine and keeps us moving in stress, is depleted. And if nothing fills the gap – nothing external to define and evaluate your worth, no other reasons to go on, nothing to explain the why, what, and how of each day – for some time, one can become unmoored. It takes an update and reframing of your beliefs and sense of self, a new round of "meaning-making", to work through the trauma's impact.
Trauma is not necessarily proportional to an event's intensity. Some people will process what has happened better than others, and as Trickey points out, our meaning-making is not uniform. As well as there being no necessary relationship between the apparent strength of our belief systems and their application in trauma, "it can actually depend on what sort of day you're having", says Trickey. "It's really difficult to work out what's going to be traumatic for whom."
When trauma goes viral
Yet even with a more developed understanding of trauma, the idea of a "mass trauma" may raise questions. If trauma is about the interface of events and individual minds, what makes a mass trauma possible? Can groups themselves be traumatised? And why might Covid-19 be a case study?
At its simplest level, a mass trauma (otherwise known as a "collective trauma") takes place when the same event, or series of events, traumatises a large number of people within some shared time span. And while it lacks the graphic and accelerated intensity of a war or terrorist attack, Covid-19 is in many ways a textbook case.
[…]
That the environment isn't obviously threatening, too, is part of the problem. The ordinary world – the friends, family, neighbours, places, that comprise normality – still looks and feels the same, but it has been reframed as a space fraught with physical dangers. The foundations of our worldview – the very things towards which we'd turn when under pressure from more tangible threats – are undercut. It's a Catch-22 at a basic level.
[…]
"If one person is unemployed, that's a personal crisis of meaning," says Gilad Hirschberger, a social psychologist at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private research college in Israel. "But when a large percentage of the population of this country no longer work, then that becomes a crisis of meaning [for the system]." For those still in jobs, fresh transitions to remote working can prove subtly traumatic. "The definition of who they are changes," says Hirschberger.
Children's exposure to vicarious and non-vicarious mass trauma is especially critical. Since their narrative anchors are less concrete than adults, children are at once more adaptable but also more sensitive. "They could develop a view of the world which is pretty terrifying," says Trickey of the UK Trauma Council. "You know, 'My parents aren't coping; the world is unsafe; and the people that should be looking after us aren't doing their job.' And that does lead, if we're not careful, to a permanent colouring of your view of things. I often think of it as a lens.
"You have a lens through which you see the world, yourself and other people. And events will colour that lens. [With enough stress], even when those events have stopped, some people are left with a coloured lens."
If some children are traumatised for the long-term, Covid-19 risks being an intergenerational phenomenon once they grow up and have kids of their own. They could transmit their trauma through encouraging unconscious imitation, deliberate and conscious conditioning, or even possibly epigenetics, when traumatic stress materially alters a genetic inheritance (although research is early-stage). Studies of Aboriginal Australians, for example, have linked disparities and low outcomes in education completion, employment, infant mortality and other social metrics to the ripples of historic traumas.
[…]
The effects of mass traumas are more than psychological, says Basoglu, but spread out to impact society more broadly. Once large numbers of people are traumatised – their relationships altered, their connection to broader social systems ruptured, their function as citizens undermined – "they have social effects, they have economic effects, they have political effects".
A study of mass trauma survivors in China, for example, found their political participation permanently decreased. Mass trauma may even create a collective yearning for strong leaders, accelerating authoritarianism and fomenting the conditions for rash, seemingly decisive policy responses. And as a group-affecting phenomenon, mass trauma alters and activates the subtler ways in which groups are bound together: in other words, the cornerstones of meaning-making, the independent variable of trauma, on a group level.
Groups vs individuals
Social psychologists have called them "the basic tissues of social life": common origin stories, expectations of conduct, rituals, shared institutions and social spaces, a sense of destiny, their relationship with "the other", who "the other" may be. In parallel to the traumatised individual, whose own psychic tissues are torn to bits by an event, mass trauma risks a blow to the group's social tissues, and one so severe that its core self could be jeopardised.
Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, has noticed the impact of Covid-19 in subtle and damaging ways. The US's social tissues, for example, are consumed by a "feeling of chaos, being out of control, as if the country is falling apart" wrought by the pandemic, he says.
And the US's mass trauma has been a double-whammy, Alexander suggests. The Black Lives Matter protests in May, combined with growing knowledge of stark racial inequalities in viral deaths, has led Covid-19 to intersect with more longstanding historical traumas around race. Evidence suggests that people of colour, and black Americans especially, face intergenerational traumas from racism and discrimination. These events have raised fears of a cascading collective trauma with more damaging implications.
[…]
The problem of forgetting
Perhaps more than anything else, though, the lasting social dangers of mass trauma consist in forgetting. When it goes unprocessed, undiscussed, perhaps actively repressed, the group's social tissues remain disturbed and unhealed. Individual trauma builds up unrecognised and festers under the cracks.
In Lebanon, war-affected communities have been seen to occupy "sequential traumatisation", or cycles of "hyper-arousal" and "numbing", as have traumatised refugee groups in Syria and Palestine. Exposed to reminders of an unprocessed trauma, individuals may act in fits of aggression and anxiety. Or in the hope of preventing re-exposure to triggers, they may act with "avoidance, apathy or passivity". On a group level, there may be cyclical episodes of violence and aggression against others, followed by withdrawal. Sometimes, officials may even pretend the original traumatic events never happened, including the censorship of school textbooks. In the delicate politics of a new leadership, such forgetting – a fatal attraction for traumatised communities – can form an especially potent engine of grievance and social tension.
[…]
Trauma can be understood as a rupture in "meaning-making", says David Trickey, a psychologist and representative of the UK Trauma Council. When "the way you see yourself, the way you see the world, and the way you see other people" are shocked and overturned by an event – and a gap arises between your "orienting systems" and that event – simple stress cascades into trauma, often-mediated through sustained and severe feelings of helplessness.
Even our most everyday tragedies stand as potential pits for trauma. Being fired from a job, for example, can be highly traumatic. One's identity, the foundation of a "personal GPS", is often tied to work and its execution. A job provides self-esteem, purpose and a social network, as well as comprising the activities of much of waking life. Being unexpectedly fired overturns this all. Stress accumulates and the nervous system is forced on high-alert.
One's mental resilience, the oil that churns our cognitive machine and keeps us moving in stress, is depleted. And if nothing fills the gap – nothing external to define and evaluate your worth, no other reasons to go on, nothing to explain the why, what, and how of each day – for some time, one can become unmoored. It takes an update and reframing of your beliefs and sense of self, a new round of "meaning-making", to work through the trauma's impact.
Trauma is not necessarily proportional to an event's intensity. Some people will process what has happened better than others, and as Trickey points out, our meaning-making is not uniform. As well as there being no necessary relationship between the apparent strength of our belief systems and their application in trauma, "it can actually depend on what sort of day you're having", says Trickey. "It's really difficult to work out what's going to be traumatic for whom."
When trauma goes viral
Yet even with a more developed understanding of trauma, the idea of a "mass trauma" may raise questions. If trauma is about the interface of events and individual minds, what makes a mass trauma possible? Can groups themselves be traumatised? And why might Covid-19 be a case study?
At its simplest level, a mass trauma (otherwise known as a "collective trauma") takes place when the same event, or series of events, traumatises a large number of people within some shared time span. And while it lacks the graphic and accelerated intensity of a war or terrorist attack, Covid-19 is in many ways a textbook case.
[…]
That the environment isn't obviously threatening, too, is part of the problem. The ordinary world – the friends, family, neighbours, places, that comprise normality – still looks and feels the same, but it has been reframed as a space fraught with physical dangers. The foundations of our worldview – the very things towards which we'd turn when under pressure from more tangible threats – are undercut. It's a Catch-22 at a basic level.
[…]
"If one person is unemployed, that's a personal crisis of meaning," says Gilad Hirschberger, a social psychologist at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private research college in Israel. "But when a large percentage of the population of this country no longer work, then that becomes a crisis of meaning [for the system]." For those still in jobs, fresh transitions to remote working can prove subtly traumatic. "The definition of who they are changes," says Hirschberger.
Children's exposure to vicarious and non-vicarious mass trauma is especially critical. Since their narrative anchors are less concrete than adults, children are at once more adaptable but also more sensitive. "They could develop a view of the world which is pretty terrifying," says Trickey of the UK Trauma Council. "You know, 'My parents aren't coping; the world is unsafe; and the people that should be looking after us aren't doing their job.' And that does lead, if we're not careful, to a permanent colouring of your view of things. I often think of it as a lens.
"You have a lens through which you see the world, yourself and other people. And events will colour that lens. [With enough stress], even when those events have stopped, some people are left with a coloured lens."
If some children are traumatised for the long-term, Covid-19 risks being an intergenerational phenomenon once they grow up and have kids of their own. They could transmit their trauma through encouraging unconscious imitation, deliberate and conscious conditioning, or even possibly epigenetics, when traumatic stress materially alters a genetic inheritance (although research is early-stage). Studies of Aboriginal Australians, for example, have linked disparities and low outcomes in education completion, employment, infant mortality and other social metrics to the ripples of historic traumas.
[…]
The effects of mass traumas are more than psychological, says Basoglu, but spread out to impact society more broadly. Once large numbers of people are traumatised – their relationships altered, their connection to broader social systems ruptured, their function as citizens undermined – "they have social effects, they have economic effects, they have political effects".
A study of mass trauma survivors in China, for example, found their political participation permanently decreased. Mass trauma may even create a collective yearning for strong leaders, accelerating authoritarianism and fomenting the conditions for rash, seemingly decisive policy responses. And as a group-affecting phenomenon, mass trauma alters and activates the subtler ways in which groups are bound together: in other words, the cornerstones of meaning-making, the independent variable of trauma, on a group level.
Groups vs individuals
Social psychologists have called them "the basic tissues of social life": common origin stories, expectations of conduct, rituals, shared institutions and social spaces, a sense of destiny, their relationship with "the other", who "the other" may be. In parallel to the traumatised individual, whose own psychic tissues are torn to bits by an event, mass trauma risks a blow to the group's social tissues, and one so severe that its core self could be jeopardised.
Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, has noticed the impact of Covid-19 in subtle and damaging ways. The US's social tissues, for example, are consumed by a "feeling of chaos, being out of control, as if the country is falling apart" wrought by the pandemic, he says.
And the US's mass trauma has been a double-whammy, Alexander suggests. The Black Lives Matter protests in May, combined with growing knowledge of stark racial inequalities in viral deaths, has led Covid-19 to intersect with more longstanding historical traumas around race. Evidence suggests that people of colour, and black Americans especially, face intergenerational traumas from racism and discrimination. These events have raised fears of a cascading collective trauma with more damaging implications.
[…]
The problem of forgetting
Perhaps more than anything else, though, the lasting social dangers of mass trauma consist in forgetting. When it goes unprocessed, undiscussed, perhaps actively repressed, the group's social tissues remain disturbed and unhealed. Individual trauma builds up unrecognised and festers under the cracks.
In Lebanon, war-affected communities have been seen to occupy "sequential traumatisation", or cycles of "hyper-arousal" and "numbing", as have traumatised refugee groups in Syria and Palestine. Exposed to reminders of an unprocessed trauma, individuals may act in fits of aggression and anxiety. Or in the hope of preventing re-exposure to triggers, they may act with "avoidance, apathy or passivity". On a group level, there may be cyclical episodes of violence and aggression against others, followed by withdrawal. Sometimes, officials may even pretend the original traumatic events never happened, including the censorship of school textbooks. In the delicate politics of a new leadership, such forgetting – a fatal attraction for traumatised communities – can form an especially potent engine of grievance and social tension.