Our Collective Trauma
Many of us remain mentally stuck in 2020 because so much has happened in and since that year then that our minds have not yet processed, because the events of the pandemic and related human activity which started in that year have been overwhelmingly intense, painful, threatening and revelatory . Our minds are so busy trying to process those events that we can’t be fully present with what’s going on now.
This is what happens in the mind of people who have been traumatised, so the inception and popularity of the above meme indicates that we have been collectively traumatised, a phenomenon also known as mass trauma.
What makes Covid-19’s trauma truly “massive”… is its impact on the entire population — including those who will never catch the virus or even know people who have. For many, the prospect of catching a deadly invisible disease, however unrealised, is obviously and intrinsically frightening…
Plus, against the sedate stasis of locked-down life, the virus’ exponential spread is difficult to comprehend. Our very sense of real life and its rhythms is disrupted, and anecdotal reports of distorted time, “a year of fog”, and scatterbrain abound. This isn’t helped by Covid-19’s constant attention in the media, either.
— BBC News
Perhaps most traumatic has been the social isolation, which has seen people separated from loved ones even in death, mourning and grief. A study found that observing people’s loneliness was the most effective way of predicting the severity of their trauma symptoms, which suggests that social isolation, by producing loneliness, can act as a devastatingly traumatic force.
For some people, maybe a very small minority, the trauma of the pandemic and related human activity and will be severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of PTSD.
What are PTSD and PPSD?
PTSD is a widely recognised condition, but there is often confusion about it’s core characteristics and symptoms, so here is a succinct overview of PTSD and its symptoms as published by Mayoclinic.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.
Most people who go through traumatic events may have temporary difficulty adjusting and coping, but with time and good self-care, they usually get better. If the symptoms get worse, last for months or even years, and interfere with your day-to-day functioning, you may have PTSD.
Flashbacks and uncontrollable thoughts about a traumatic event give the sense of being mentally stuck in the time at which it happened, such as the year of 2020 in which the pandemic began, and may be symptomatic of PTSD.
While it is possible that some people reading this may have undiagnosed PTSD as a result of the trauma of the pandemic and related human activity, professional clinical assessment is necessary to determine whether or not a PTSD diagnosis can be applied to you. I strongly emphasise that this article is is not intended to be a guide people to self-diagnosing PTSD, but rather to raise awareness and knowledge of its symptoms, of trauma in general, and how we have been collectively traumatised by pandemic-related circumstances, so that we can begin to heal.
PTSD aside, anyone who experiences a distressing event which overwhelms their mind’s capacity to cope has been psychologically traumatised.
When I write of trauma in this article I am not specifically referring to PTSD, but to this overwhelming psychological distress and the interference with day-to-day functioning it causes until it is healed. The distress of and interference caused by trauma will not always be severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of PTSD, but it will always cause us great pain and difficulty, which awareness and knowledge can help us heal and overcome.
Post Pandemic Stress Disorder (PPSD), unlike PTSD, is an unofficial term coined by Owen O’Kane, former clinical lead for mental health for the NHS, to diagnose and describe collective trauma and resulting PTSD caused by the pandemic. Mainstream media are beginning to use this term frequently, often accompanied by interviews with O’Kane.
In a Vogue article he says that “over the past year, many people have been exposed to varying degrees of trauma. The main problem is, it’s been relentless, and this is why I believe post-pandemic stress disorder will explode. At present, this won’t be recognized as a significant problem because we are normalizing the circumstances. However, like all traumas, the impact will show when the pandemic is over.”
People have certainly been exposed pandemic-related trauma, but does this mean we should pay attention to O’Kafe’s concept of PPSD? Well, we should pay attention to his observations about trauma, but not to the term he has coined to label it. There is good reason not to take the term seriously, as shown by this article:
“Post Pandemic Stress Disorder”…seriously? — The Burning Platform
Doctors are warning that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK could be at increased risk of heart disease or cardiac events. Speaking to the Evening Standard, psychological therapist Mark Rayner and vascular surgeon Tahir Hussein said that the UK could see “300,000 new patients with heart issues” in the near future.
What’s to blame? Well, that would be “Post Pandemic Stress Disorder”. A new condition “yet to be recognised”, even though “many experts believe it should be”. It’s a totally real thing. They didn’t just completely make it up. Don’t be cynical.
Yes, your sarcasm detector is testing positive.
PPSD is not a medically recognised term, and there is almost certainly a sinister agenda behind it’s use in mainstream media. We can get a sense of this agenda when we see that as stated in the above quoted article, mainstream journalistic media are claiming that PPSD will be responsible for hundreds of thousands of heart attacks. Yet the same mainstream media are censoring information about the medically verified heart problems caused by COVID vaccines, and are therefore propagating a biased public view of the risks of heart problems which result from taking COVID vaccines. The word ‘propagating’ sounds awful like ‘propaganda’, does it not?
When you can find far more mainstream news articles blaming a non-medical made up psychiatric condition for heart problems than you can about the widely documented and medically verifiable heart problems caused by COVID vaccines, it is obvious that something fishy is going on. Therefore I discourage use of the term PPSD, but O’ Kanes observation of how normalisation affects the recognition of trauma is important, so let’s discuss that.
Normalisation Hides Trauma
Normalisation refers to the unconscious and conscious efforts made by state and public alike to make the pandemic and related restrictions seem normal. Phrases like “we just have to get on with it”, “these are just the rules” and “just do what they say like the rest of us” are examples of what we might call bottom-up or ‘grassroots’ pandemic normalisation, as to some extent is making memes, some of which are admittedly hilarious.
From the top down it is state-issued schemes, campaigns and penalties which serve to normalise the pandemic and related restrictions. In England there are vaccination and testing centres in ordinary location from local parks to high street shop buildings in pretty much every town and city, so the pandemic here, as with virtually everywhere, is almost unassailably normal. Across the world, relentless obscenely excessive media coverage create an omnipresent sense of pandemic normality.
As O’Kane points out, normalisation of the traumatic circumstances of the pandemic and related human activity, which were outlined in and beneath the first featured quote in this article, means the impact of the trauma won’t be recognised as a significant problem until these circumstances don’t seem normal anymore, in the same way we didn’t recognise many significant privileges as privileges — like being free to travel our country or the world without worrying about travel bans and vaccine passports — when being in a pandemic-free society seemed normal.
That’s because those privileges were normalised, and everything which seems normal becomes less visible to us, while everything which seems abnormal sticks out like a sore thumb. We don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone, because what we’ve got seems normal while we’ve got it.
A common example of normalisation hiding trauma can be seen in breakdown of toxic relationships in which things have been toxic for a long time before the break up happens. There may have been months, years, even decades of traumatising toxicity in their relationship before the couple split, and after they part ways their pain becomes vastly amplified.
Some of this amplification is due to the grief of separation, but much of that pain was caused by the toxicity and was already there, it was just hidden by the normality of the traumatising circumstance, which in this case was a toxic relationship. Once they seperate and this circumstance isn’t normal anymore, the trauma resulting from the toxicity becomes impossible to ignore, creating the possibility of healing which did not exist while the trauma was normalised into invisibility.
Normalising pandemic-related circumstances makes it hard for us to heal from our resulting collective trauma, because the traumatising circumstances have been normalised almost into invisibility, and therefore seem unrelated to the symptoms of trauma we might be experiencing such as feeling mentally stuck in 2020. When we can’t connect the dots between our distress, interference with our day-to-day functioning and the traumatic circumstances causing these, we cannot find effective ways to heal.
Normalisation isn’t always harmful. It can be helpful when we use it to show how things we believe to be abnormal are actually normal, such as common psychological responses to trauma. Examples of these include fatigue, irritability, depression, suicidal thoughts and feelings and the sense of being mentally stuck in a traumatic moment of the past. These experiences can seem abnormal and therefore shameful and threatening, but in relation to trauma they are normal responses, so normalising them — as I intend to do with this article — helps us by grounding us in reality.
People and the powers that be are normalising pandemic-related circumstances, even though they aren’t actually normal. These circumstances have certainly engulfed our society and been the most attention-grabbing events of the last two years (thanks in no small part to the obscenely excessive concerted mainstream media effort to saturate us with information and misinformation about the pandemic) and they will have long-lasting effects, but what we call the pandemic will eventually be replaced by a new set of collective circumstances which won’t include a global pandemic, at which point we will realise it was never normal.
We will realise it was a few years of utter societal immersion into a crisis which was in parts natural and in parts human-made and in high parts human-exaggerated, and we adapted. Our adaption to traumatic circumstances made them feel normal, but the fact is it was never normal to be in a pandemic. If we can figure out what normal is and in doing so remember that what is happening now is absolutely abnormal, we might become more aware of the traumatic pandemic-related circumstances which could be causing us distress and interfering with our lives.
I live in England where the idiom “keep calm and carry on” is deeply embedded into our public psyche, so the normalisation of traumatic circumstances here is a tradition descended from the “stiff upper lip” which has spawned an internationally lucrative brand with it’s own merchandise, website and everything. After all, this slogan and the original graphic was invented to instruct us English people on how to behave while transitioning into one of the few collective traumas in recent history of a similar scale to the pandemic: World War Two.
However, this sentiment is far from specific to the second world war, or to England for that matter. Throughout human history and all over the world we had and will always have no choice but to carry on when faced with crisis, and many of us believe we must keep calm as we do, for the people around us if not for ourselves. We will keep going and making our way through life, trying to stay calm about our personal and collective situation.
But we don’t need to stay calm, because what many if not most of us are experiencing is psychological trauma which gives us no reason to be calm, and instead triggers a painful and often paralysing array of powerful emotions which can make achieving our goals almost impossible and cause havoc in our meaningful relationships — if we are fortunate enough to have any left .
We deserve to allow ourselves to recognise the pain of our trauma instead of suppressing it behind a mask of calm. In fact, it is only by recognising this pain that it becomes possible to heal from the trauma which we may not even realise is causing us distress and interfering with our day-to-day functioning. This distress and interference won’t always be severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of PTSD, but it will always cause us great pain and difficulty, which we can overcome with awareness and knowledge.
I’m going to end this by handing you back over to some ordinary social media users, because you don’t need me or any other media person or some medical know-it-all to tell you what’s going on, you just have to browse comments sections. Amongst the shitposting, trolling, bot spam and vitriolic hatred there is an abundance of people articulating deep truths about our situation because we’re not stupid.
We know what’s going on. We know the we’re collectively traumatised, in some cases to the point of PTSD. Much of our trauma has come from the pandemic itself, mostly from the human activities or more specifically state- and corporation-mandated foolishness and evil which has arisen in response to the pandemic.
There’s a wealth of resources available to us on and offline, some of which I’ve linked at the end of this article, which guide us through the process of trauma healing, but the first step in the process is always recognising that the trauma exists. This article serves to assist with this recognition — it’s the ignition spark or fanning of the flames which fuel our healing process. But as Mr. David Wood says below, regardless of our trauma, life goes on.
Resources For Guidance Through Trauma Healing
Rev. Sheri Heller, LCSW — Medium — Compassionate contemplations on a wide range of topics by a qualified experienced trauma therapist with a flair for writing.
Invisible Illness (medium.com) — Active mental health publication with a curation of personal entries and an overarching grounding in science.
Home | Mind, the mental health charity — help for mental health problems — Professionally organised information about mental health conditions and services with a section dedicated to PTSD.
Any search engine — Search ‘trauma healing’, look for good audience feedback and trust your gut to lead you to some good trauma healing guidance.
Personal recommendations — Ask people you trust if they know of any good resources for trauma healing guidance.
Community — It’s here for us to lean on, or if not, to build and rebuild.
