In a prospective study of caregivers responsible for their spouses prior to their deaths, for example, Bonanno and colleagues found evidence of preexisting depression in participants who responded to their loss with resilience as well as those who experienced symptoms of chronic grief, suggesting that depression itself was not the dividing line between these groups.
Bonanno and Galatzer-Levy further examined the relationship between depression and trauma through a Psychological Science study of 2, adults before and after they experienced a heart attack. During that time, individuals who reported an increase in symptoms of depression after their heart attack were found to have a significantly higher mortality rate than individuals who did not experience an increase in these symptoms. Participants who were already experiencing depression before the heart attack but reported no increase in symptoms did not demonstrate this increase in mortality, however, and some even reported that their symptoms improved.
The study also linked optimism and resilience. In a similar study of divorced individuals in Clinical Psychological Science , Bonanno, Galatzer-Levy, and Matteo Malgaroli found increased mortality only among participants who became depressed after their divorce.
This appears to be true whether an individual experiences one or multiple potentially traumatic events, he noted. In a study of 1, individuals with lung disease, heart disease, stroke, or cancer, Bonanno and colleagues found that participants who became depressed after their illness demonstrated a similarly increased risk of mortality regardless of how many health events they experienced.
In addition, participants who experienced more than one health event were just as likely to react with resilience. Resilient individuals often possess greater regulatory flexibility, which helps them to develop and apply a more diverse range of coping strategies, Bonanno said. His lab is beginning to investigate the role of genetics as well. Is there a gene for resilience itself?
Not likely, Bonanno noted, but he and his colleagues are finding that individuals who are more resilient have less of a genetic risk for psychopathology. Bonanno, G. Psychological resilience after disaster: New York City in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack. Psychological Science , 17 3 , — Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to months postloss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 83 5 , — Galatzer-Levy, I.
Optimism and death: Predicting the course and consequences of depression trajectories in response to heart attack. Psychological Science , 5 12 , — Heterogeneity in threat extinction learning: Substantive and methodological considerations for identifying individual difference in response to stress.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience , 7, Article Perspectives on Psychological Science , 8 6 , — Minimal-impact resilience is when a person takes a blow and keeps going. Emergent resilience is when a person struggles for a long time, and everything is in flux. When people are going through chemotherapy and a prolonged physical assault, they are going to be emotionally up and down a lot. In our study of women diagnosed with breast cancer, one of the variables that predicted a better outcome was less difficulty with treatment decision-making.
I am going to consider my options, make the best choice, and do my best to survive. How long does it take to recover from these situations? By the same token, it is not random either. We have repeatedly identified a set of prototypical outcome patterns.
Some people are completely overwhelmed by an event in their life and take years to regain their footing. In another pattern, which we call the recovery pattern, people struggle for a number of months, and then it takes a year or two for them to gradually come back to where they were before the event took place.
The most common pattern of resilience is that in which people are disturbed for a little while—a few days to a few weeks—but then they are okay and resume their life.
When people lose a loved one, they have intense emotional reactions, but the reactions are not encompassing, they are episodic. The grieving person may be intensely sad for a short period of time and then have flashes of sadness over a longer period of time, coming in and out of that state, but he keeps functioning and has positive phases in which the sadness is replaced with laughter and being connected to other people. What is the healthy response to a serious illness or the realization of impending death from the illness?
People are losing their homes. We thought we could get through this and rise to the challenge. But in August , when Francis was quarantining at home alone in Oakland, California, he lost one of his closest friends; just before Christmas, his grandfather died. Neither death was caused by the coronavirus, but the inability to mourn with others in his community has hit him harder than he could have imagined.
Francis is not alone. The Stress in America survey , conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of the American Psychological Association, found that 19 percent of the nearly 3, adult respondents said their mental health was worse than at the same time last year. The poll was conducted from August 4 to Mourning the death of a loved one or being thrown into economic uncertainty is doubly difficult when people are forced to reckon with it alone.
Laura Sinko, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a mental health nurse with expertise in trauma recovery, told Vox that the grief around Covid has a far bigger footprint than we might think. But, Sinko adds, the effects extend beyond the number of lives lost. We are isolated. We are lonely. And we are all, in some way, grieving. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I was also panicked, terrified, and lost. But I knew I needed to find a way to cope, especially since I have bipolar disorder and was recovering from a recent suicide attempt.
If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm, or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, there are people who want to help. The International Association for Suicide Prevention lists a number of suicide hotlines by country. Click here to find them. Befrienders Worldwide. To escape constant thoughts of suicide — or to at least gain distance from those thoughts — I found that I had no choice but to rally. I helped distribute personal protective equipment to front-line health care workers , started a mutual aid fund at Howard University for survivors of sexual violence , and, like others, gave astronomical tips to Instacart delivery workers who were risking their lives to bring people food and being underpaid and mistreated for it.
For a while, it felt like my community and I were working together, filling the gaping holes of care and responsibility left by the Trump administration. In the middle of the pandemonium, we at least had the small comfort of solidarity.
Many of us tried to save each other and tried to save ourselves. Some baked bread, cooked, cleaned, crocheted, and Zoomed to the point of exhaustion. Others refused to wear masks or continued to live their lives normally, whether out of denial, boredom, or a lack of resources to take these steps.
Meanwhile, federal and local governments alike have failed to close down businesses and large gatherings and provide economic support, or even sound medical advice. The Covid death toll in the US is more than , people higher than it was when I started working on this story just weeks ago. That number is unfathomable to me.
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