Pandemic Trauma
Yesterday my wife and I went to Whole Foods - she wanted to get PLNT burgers for lunch, and it dovetailed well with needing some cheese substitutes (lactose intolerance for the lose).
Of course we’re masked - double-masking, actually, keeping distance, wearing gloves, and so on. Remarkably, everyone else was, too. But even so, driving home my wife commented that she was on the verge of a panic attack, that there were just Too Many People.
And I wasn’t quite as bad, but I totally get what she’s saying. And we’re going to be like that for a very long time. We’ve trained ourselves to think of crowds, of enclosed spaces, and bad and scary. It’s a good choice right now, definitely. But in the long term… this is trauma.
This is the entire country being traumatized. The vast majority of the country will be like this.
But here’s where this gets funky. Psychological disorders are, as I’m given to believe, diagnosed in terms of deviation from normal response to stimulus, and how it affects your life. How do you diagnose it when the entire population is traumatized? How do you diagnose a deviant response when everyone has that response?
And that makes me think further. What if there’s some trauma which is completely pervasive, which has been slowly building in a population for an entire population for a long time? Like, oh, say, increasing levels of food and economic insecurity and anxiety building up over the course of fifty years? To the point where literally everyone, even the most wealthy, live in constant fear of losing their homes and livelihoods? What would that look like? What would that cause?
Nah. No reason to worry about it. That could never happen, right?
That’s a good question.
I don’t have an answer for it; I’m not sure what the US is like, as I’ve never been there. But the idea of collective trauma building up over years is not at all strange to me.
Communism in Romania happened over decades (1947-1989). First, speech became highly regulated. You had to be communist, or pretend well enough that you were (the penalties ranging from making life difficult for you and your family to outright forced labor camps). Thirty years on, you can still feel the effects of that, although much diminished, as generations including my own, which didn’t get the full brunt of communism, could develop in a safer environment.
Even so, you have not just a distrust of authority as possibly helping, but also a fear of being out of line and wrong. It’s subtle, though. Living within the phenomenon, it’s hard for me to tell what’s different here, really. And I’m not sure how oppressive this was to the majority of the population, towards the end. Were ways of thinking altered so entirely that it ceased to be actively oppressive for some? Who knows.
Another thing that happened was that, luxury goods being scarce and people being demotivated when it came to their jobs, there was a culture of giving gifts and asking friends of friends to intervene on your behalf when you needed something done. This is still visible now - it’s an ongoing debate about how customary it still is to give gifts to doctors to ensure they take care of your loved ones. Kind of like a bribe to do their jobs. (Some say the culture is still there; others, that it no longer is. It might depend on the doctor and the hospital.)
Food shortages became a thing in the ‘80s, and that left lasting trauma on a lot of people. Some people stockpile food, filling their freezers and pantries with everything they could find, just in case. A friend of my mother’s used to buy things like frozen meat beyond the capacity of her own freezer, so she’d ask my mum to hold on to them - sometimes for months of end - until two years ago, when mum decided enough was enough. Conversely, mum herself cannot abide having a lot of food around the house, because she feels like she’s then absolutely obligated to eat it whether she wants to or not, just because it’s there.
The interesting thing is that you can definitely see the mechanisms of trauma a bit better. When the entire society is like that, you understand the thought processes that lead to unusual behavior because the logic behind them is familiar to you. But it might be harder to escape behaviors that might no longer be necessary, because those around you might try to reinforce them to keep you safe.
“How do you diagnose a deviant response when everyone has that response? “ To answer that question: It’s by how adaptive or not the response is. Does it interfere (to varying degrees) in your life?
Needing to avoid crowd WILL disrupt your life, it’s therefore considered a disorder, regardless of how many people have that problem.
Reblogging especially for the perspective from Romania. I once heard an Andrei Codrescu speak of Romania’s collective trauma as an entire country in need of psychoanalysis. I lived there after the wall came down in the early 90s and the population-wide trauma was profound and still very, very fresh. I’d not thought to compare the last year to Romania but, I can see disturbing parallels. This is by no means to equate pandemic inconveniences and fear with the profound, decades-long oppression of the Romanian people – but only that it is an example of a societal-wide trauma felt at many, many levels.
one of the weirdest things about the pandemic trauma is that there’s a segment of the population that has spent the last year completely denying reality, refusing to accept that covid was really happening–or if it was, that it was all that bad–and thinking everyone else was either stupid or crazy. now the pandemic’s finally easing off, these people are seeing everyone return to a normalcy that they never actually left. they haven’t been wearing masks. they haven’t been bothering to maintain distance. they haven’t listened to any health advisories or taken it seriously when they were told that people were dying, much less how many people have died. they haven’t stopped going out to eat, drink, or party. the last year was just sort of inconvenient, for them.
so now, just in america, we have half a million dead americans. we have thousands of businesses that closed and will never reopen. we have this enormous amount of mourning to struggle through, dealing with the loss of our family and friends. we have millions more people who are now significantly or permanently disabled! we have millions and millions of people who are now claustrophobic, agoraphobic germophobes, and honestly i’m probably one of them now, because i HATE getting near people or not having hand sanitizer on me or going out at all.
and we have millions of people for whom none of this happened, or if it did, it didn’t mean anything, and either way they refuse to care. they were normal before and they were normal during it and they’ll be normal afterwards because, again, nothing actually happened to them.
so like. that’s interesting.
