Processing COVID: Understanding the Pandemic as a Group Trauma

by: mike morse, 12/15/2020

Every day I wake up, turn on the news, and hope for some sort of change in the way we as humans react to this pandemic. As of this month, the US has been living with this disease for nine months. The death rate is unspeakable, and the impact of this virus on minority communities and prison populations is beyond devastating. “Essential workers” constantly receive public praise, yet their cries of exhaustion and anxiety are ignored. I started asking myself, “How can anyone be so selfish as to ignore the pain, suffering, and death of so many people?” People worldwide have experienced a traumatic loss, in fact one I would consider “big T trauma” worthy: loss of our previous life. Some experienced major losses: their loved ones, jobs, or houses. Others lost their opportunity to have a well-deserved graduation ceremony or access to the pre-pandemic job market. Whether your loss has been social, economic, occupational, or something else, it is still a major change that many of us have not taken the time to process. Instead, we have done our best to make things as ‘normal’ as possible. What would it look like if we all took the time to actively process the reality that our previous life is changing in the midst of this global deadly pandemic?

I decided to look at the emotional response of American people through the lens of the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief model. This model was first introduced 50 years ago as a measure to explore stages of grief experienced by terminally ill hospitalized patients who were coming to terms with their impending death. Because of its limited scope of subjects, the model has received criticism for multiple reasons. It specifically sequences the emotional responses a limited number of terminally ill patients experienced and is merely based on a collection of case studies, therefore some claim it lacks “scientific merit.” However, I believe that it is still valid to use it as a model, noting that coming to acceptance with terminal illness is also coping with a significant change of life, and as long as we remember that this model will not fit for all people. Additionally, it is important to remember that while the model suggests that the stages come about in a linear manner, this is not necessarily true. Not everyone goes through all of the phases or in any particular order. Some stages are skipped entirely by certain individuals, and some people are more likely to regress to previous stages than others. With this in mind, the model can still be applied to understand the mindset of a general population in response to a group traumatic loss.

The first stage patients went through was denial. Currently, many people somehow still believe COVID is not real, or that they are somehow ‘immune’ from the disease, and therefore act in ways that put themselves and others in danger. We know at this point that this is just straight up not true — no one is immune to COVID, not even people who have already been infected with the virus. Peoples’ forced ignorance of the disease has resulted in thousands of lives lost. We could blame our government for not getting involved enough, but I think this is minimizing the entirety of the situation. I live in Florida, where our state government has made nearly no efforts to stop the spread of the virus (there are nearly no restrictions on reopening non-essential businesses), and nine months into a deadly global pandemic, people are still actively making the decision to go out to bars, clubs, and restaurants regularly. Looking through Governor DeSantis’s archive of reports on the virus, I found that for months the state’s agenda only pushed the fact that adults over the age of 65 were at risk, until about mid-June when there was a spike in cases among the 20–30 year old range, and then younger people were barely mentioned as being a new at-risk group. Additionally, because of the structure of our economy, health and safety restrictions are more often than not left up to individual businesses and corporations, rather than governmental standards. This leaves too much power over public health in the private sector. In the end, mask wearing and other viral spread reduction measures have become highly politicalized, resulting in a lack of accountability while outbreaks continue to reemerge. While we could speculate all day as to what the reasons are behind the government’s lack of urgent response, it is important to note that both the government and the residents of this state are allowing the virus to continue its significant spread by living in this stage of denial. While not all states are reacting like Florida, I think it’s important to note how some of the worst-managed states are responding to the pandemic.

Some people may have moved on to the next stage of anger simply from reading that previous paragraph. It’s not fair that millions of kids lost out on their senior spring of high school. It’s not fair that our national leader belittled this virus that is disproportionally killing people of color every day. It’s not fair that 11 million Americans are unemployed while 600 billionaires have increased their net worth by over $950 billion during the pandemic. It is not fair how the American people have been treated by their government in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Once again, we see the actions (or lack thereof) of our government in placing protections on profit and power over the lives of people. Some of us have been angry about this reality for our whole lifetimes. Others may have just woken up to this reality in the midst of the pandemic. Regardless of how long you have been aware of the violence of capitalism, I truly believe that an increasing number of people are growing angry at the US government for the way that it has handled this epidemic catastrophe. In the state of anger, a lot can happen. Anger can be motivating yet draining. Feeling this sense of anger can sometimes be a way to build connections and community over joint anger and pain. However, remaining in this state long-term often results in fatigue and isolation. From here, most people will jump to one of the three final stages: bargaining, depression, or acceptance. Not everyone will experience all of these phases, and not all will happen in the same order, however, I believe that many people will recognize shared experiences they have had with the COVID pandemic in relation to the final three stages.

Bargaining I think is the least common stage experienced during the pandemic, and may actually be most experienced by those least directly impacted by it. Those who haven’t lost their job, loved ones, or been majorly uprooted due to the pandemic (aka those who are less systematically vulnerable) are more likely to bargain with the fate of the pandemic. What I mean by this is that they are more likely to think their behaviors (such as going to indoor spaces, not wearing a mask) are okay to do on occasion because they aren’t around as many people, aren’t doing it as often as they did before the pandemic, or they haven’t known anyone personally who has gotten sick from their actions. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed, those who have come face to face with COVID more personally seem less likely to ‘bargain’ their way out of following the restrictions and guidelines recommended by scientists and health experts.

The fourth stage, depression, is another stage less (publically) experienced during this pandemic. For those in this stage, thoughts may include feeling like no one else is taking the pandemic seriously, feeling isolated due to the pandemic, feeling sad or disappointed with how governmental structures have handled the catastrophe, or grieving their life before the pandemic. Not everyone will or has reached this stage, and the length of time people spend in this stage varies greatly. However, this stage may be the most debilitating; being stuck in this stage may lead to lapses in personal, interpersonal, occupational, and emotional maintenance and nurturance. Some people may stop taking care of their health, give up on social connections, or struggle to find pleasure in daily activities. In fact, I bet that we will soon see a new diagnostic label given to “COVID-onset depression”. As a psychological scholar accustomed to a medical model/DSM world, this is particularly interesting to me. I believe that many people are getting stuck in a place of anxiety directly related to COVID, and this also could merit a diagnostic label according to (western) psychological doctors and researchers. Amidst this global viral pandemic, we are also facing a national socioemotional epidemic — one where individuals are losing social connections and reinforcements daily, facing increasing amounts of social anxiety directly related to others’ poor decision making, increased substance abuse, and I speculate increased suicide (although this has not been proven in quick research I performed, there have been articles published that suggest “suicide risk” is increased, and by engaging in any ounce of critical thought most people would believe that actual suicidality has increased as well.)

The final stage, acceptance, is the stage of learning. People can enter this stage at any point along the journey of processing COVID, and situations that people face can cause them to revert to previous phases. People in this stage understand the realities of COVID, seeing how many millions of people are being traumatized from this killer that is too often belittled by the state. Once people have reached this stage, I’ve seen a pattern of individuals springing into action at varying levels. Whether this means just actively practicing social distancing, or organizing community mutual aid, people across the country are mobilizing to care for their own communities. In fact, being a part of community mutual aid has been one of the most energizing things during this pandemic for me — seeing people actually care about each other, particularly those most forgotten about by mainstream society, enough to show up when no one else will. In the area where I live , a mutual aid Facebook group was created in early March in response to the pandemic. Since then, people have been able to request direct financial support to cover bills, offer up extra time and resources to others, and just genuinely give people a sense of love and support from their community. The solidarity built in response to poor governmental management of this pandemic is astronomical and energizing; it gives me hope for the people’s revolution in the future.

Unfortunately, not enough people have reached the acceptance stage of COVID processing, or at the very least aren’t able to maintain staying in this stage. As I mentioned previously, going through these stages is not a linear process and people can bounce back and forth between stages at any point. Even people who reached the acceptance stage earlier on in the pandemic are susceptible to fatigue, depression, anger, or anything else that can shift their mindset to a different stage of processing. Maintaining a positive mindset when you feel like you don’t have much support behind you can be exhausting and isolating. We have been living through the largest mass death this country has seen in the last century, yet we still have not united as a population. It’s time to think about why this is. While it is true that the government’s response was completely inappropriate and devastating, we need to take accountability for our own individual actions as well. While it is not fair for a government established ‘in the interests of its people’ to leave those very people drowning with the responsibility of each others’ lives, that has been our reality, and we have not stepped up appropriately to play our part. As we are winding up the year 2020, we can reflect on all the ‘crazy or unprecedented’ things that have happened that feel outside of our control, but we must also look inward and think about our actions in the past year and what has been, and will continue to be, in our control.

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