Unprocessed COVID grief from 2020

Here’s a theory: the people of the United States are “in a funk” with rates of depression, anxiety, and just plain “disgruntlement” that are through the roof– because we have unresolved trauma from the pandemic. This theory is propounded in an article by clinical psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, published in The Atlantic in March. Mary Trump refers to it in her blog on Substack.

The theory claims that under normal circumstances in a national emergency, the people would unite under the leadership of an understanding and caring president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 2020, however, we were deliberately divided by the man who held the presidency at the time because he believed that the key to his re-election was to divide the people into “us” and “them.”

In medical terms, we are suffering from PTSD. We have gone through a great trauma, more than a million of us have died, and we have suddenly been told we don’t have to worry about it anymore (although hundreds of people a week are still dying from COVID). What is worse, the trauma continues because Donald Trump continues to divide us. We can’t recover from the trauma while it is still going on.

Many, in fact most, people don’t show outward signs of PTSD. The damage only results in a somewhat diminished mood. Some people have nightmares, depression, irritability, and free-floating anxiety. A few people are completely unable to function at all.

The important thing to combat this problem is a therapeutic approach to current society. A wise, benevolent leader would do the things that bring us together– someone like Joe Biden. He doesn’t have to be a good golf player; FDR, for example, couldn’t even walk and had uncontrolled hypertension (for which there was no known treatment at the time). Trump, on the other hand, is the opposite of therapy.

Our natural tendency to avoid painful memories has induced us to forget or at least weaken our memories of the worst of the pandemic. Trump was president for the first ten months, the worst months although the death toll was still limited. The incident at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 puts a firm terminus on that period in our minds.

Yet we still forget just how bad things got in 2020 and 2021. Even after Biden became president and the vaccine came out there was still a lot of dying going on. The virus spread throughout the US despite all our isolation and masking, but there was a significant sabotage movement going on that only became stronger with time. Instead of uniting over our shared experience and having the benefit of mutual support, we divided into two warring clans: red and blue. We wasted much of our energy fighting over what was going on and what to do about it.

Then the same people who denied the seriousness of COVID and questioned vaccines and masks blamed the very people who were providing the vaccine and decreeing economic relief for the inevitable inflation and supply chain problems caused by the pandemic.

Trump’s propaganda has convinced us that his lies are the truth. There’s no other way to explain the survey that shows that over 15% of us believe that Biden is responsible for the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. That’s the opposite of the truth and beats the 5% of us who think the Earth is flat.

Our current malaise is a direct result of the divisive propaganda promulgated by Trump and his allies that caught us in a vulnerable time and is still preventing us from healing by continuing the trauma.

If this malaise prevents us from re-electing Joe Biden then our country will go down a very dangerous path. Newsweek quoted Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump, as saying “He will destroy us.”