48 Scientific American, March 2021
A
my Nitza has speNt decades helpiNg people iN crisis. the director
of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State Universi-
ty of New York at New Paltz has traveled to Puerto Rico in the wake
of Hurricane Maria, to Botswana during an HIV crisis and to Haiti
to help traumatized children forced into domestic servitude.
But the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitza says, is different. It keeps
coming at people month after month as loved ones get sick or die,
as jobs are lost, and as the actions taken to avoid infection—such as isolation from family—cause
intense emotional pain and stress. Millions of people around the globe have died from the coro-
navirus, and the numbers keep climbing; grief, fear and economic hardship have hit every nation.
The U.S. has the highest death toll on the planet—400,000 people perished by early 2021—and
millions on millions have become seriously sick. Usually disasters have survivors and respond-
ers, Nitza says, but COVID is so widespread that people are both of those things at once. “We’re
training everybody [on] how to take care of themselves and how to support the people around
them,” she says.
This winter has been especially dark and hard. At the start,
deaths climbed to exceed the losses of 9/11 every day. Some-
times outbreaks recede but then rise back up again like storm-
tossed seas. Vaccines are months away for the vast majority of
us. Many hospitals are overwhelmed with waves of new COVID
patients. So no one knows when the pandemic will end or
whether the future will look anything like the past. “We as a
nation have never been in anything like this,” says Charles Fig-
ley, who has worked in disaster psychology for 40 years and is
director of the Traumatology Institute at Tulane University in
New Orleans.
The stresses are taking a terrible toll on our country’s mental
health. In June 2020 researchers at the Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention surveyed 5,412 U.S. adults and found that
25.5 percent had symptoms of anxiety and 24.3 percent had
symptoms of depression—a threefold and fourfold increase,
respectively, from 2019. It is “a staggering number,” says Susan
Borja, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Dimen-
sional Traumatic Stress Research Program. In a study that has
not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers at the City University of
New York and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
surveyed 5,250 U.S. adults in April 2020 and found that 35 per-
cent had moderate or severe anxiety symptoms. Those who had
recently lost income were doing extremely poorly.
The pains of the pandemic and its consequences are sharp-
est among people of color, who are “more exposed and less
protected,” in the words of physician Camara Phyllis Jones,
who studies health inequities. In November 2020 unemploy-
ment rates among Black and Hispanic workers were 75 and
42 percent higher, re spectively, than that among white work-
ers. Compared with white households, many more Black and
Hispanic households are struggling with food insecurity, and
nonwhite children are more likely to be learning remotely
from home rather than in person at school. These hardships
fall on top of the direct agonies inflicted by the disease: In a
study published in July 2020, New York University researchers
found that in urban U.S. counties where the population was
substantially nonwhite, the COVID death rate was nearly
10 times higher than it was in predominantly white counties
with the same median income. Among Native Americans,
another less protected group, the death rate during the
first half of 2020 was nearly twice that among white people.
Melinda Wenner Moyer, a contributing editor at Scientific
American, is author of the forthcoming book How to Raise Kids
Who Aren’t Assholes: Science-Based Strategies for Better
Parenting—from Tots to Teens (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021).
