Are we numb? Handling the collective trauma of police violence, mass shootings and a pandemic
April 25, 2021 11:09 AM CNN
Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
(CNN) A reckoning with the deaths resulting from institutionalized racism, a resurgence of almost-daily gun violence and 3.1 million pandemic deaths worldwide, there has been trauma piled upon trauma upon trauma.
It turns out these collective traumas are taking a toll on all of us, according to Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science, medicine and mental health at the University of California, Irvine. Over the course of her 40-year career, Silver has studied the effects of trauma on individuals and on society as a collective whole.
Are we numb? Handling the collective trauma of police violence, mass shootings and a pandemic ktvz.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ktvz.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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On Saturday evening, my wife and I commemorated the first anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic by inviting two friends to join us for a masked and distanced cocktail on the lawn. We are partly vaccinated, and with new cases on the decline in Los Angeles County 609 on Sunday, with just 25 deaths we’ve begun to feel for the first time in a long time something like a cautious optimism.
In the email invite to our friends, I joked that we’d be sitting shiva for the long dark year we had experienced with a minyan reduced in size for social distancing. Not a great joke, perhaps, but also not untrue. I am a keeper of dates, of occasions. This is part of how I recognize my passage through the world. Birthdays, death days, anniversaries; by remembering I keep track of where I am.
More than 55,000 Californians have died of COVID-19 in the last year. Their families have struggled to memorialize them as funerals and other gatherings were restricted. The sheer weight of so many lives lost moved Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer to tears multiple times during news briefings.
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Even those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs and our health have paid a price. We saved lives by complying with California’s strict stay-at-home orders and mask mandates. But we lost a sense of community and felt isolated and alone.
The trade-off almost became too much for Leslie Grossman, 49, an actress and third-generation Angeleno.
L A COVID-19 life brings isolation, anxiety and trauma latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.