ANGRY? RESENTFUL? GUILTY? THE PANDEMIC’S MENTAL TOLL
CNU researchers create screening tools for virus anxiety
We’ve lost things we can’t replace — priceless moments with no chance for a do-over.
Like holding a just-born grandchild.
Or a dying husband’s hand. The logical side of our brain knows why. Understands it’s no one’s fault.
The other part still stews. Anger, resentment, guilt.
That’s a psychological price of a pandemic — perhaps larger than the disease itself. While only a relatively small slice of a population might actually wind up with the illness, a wider swath bears a lingering burden of something called “disenfranchised grief.”
“That’s a whole story in itself,” said Sherman Lee, an associate professor in the psychology department of Christopher Newport University. “A quiet hell you experience all by yourself.”
While others focus on the medical and economic arenas of coronavirus, Lee leads a CNU research team that’s peering into our heads and hearts.
They’ve developed some of the first screening tools to help identify “coronaphobia” — a debilitating level of virus-fueled anxiety. Those mental health tests, according to the university, are now being used by doctors, nurses and scientists worldwide.
“Disenfranchised grief ” is another animal rearing its head, a legacy of the lockdowns that deprived us of the chance to fulfill some deep-seated obligations.
Diana Wysong is haunted by it. She and Russ Wysong were married 56 years, but heart troubles and strokes left him under hospice care in a Portsmouth nursing home, where she or one of their children visited almost daily.
In mid-March, when nursing homes closed their doors to visitors in an attempt to keep the virus out, staff wheeled Wysong’s husband to the front door so she could explain what was happening:
“I told him there’s a bad virus going around — like the flu but a hundred times worse — but he just kept asking me ‘Aren’t you coming back?’ All I could say was, ‘No honey, they won’t let me.’ But he didn’t really understand. He was visibly upset. Our visits
meant everything to him.”
Russ Wysong, 79, died the next night, March 14.
More than two months later, his wife still struggles to squeeze out the words:
“All I can think about is him dying alone. I still have nightmares about him asking for us and none of us are there. Did he think we just didn’t come? I mean, I know people die alone all the time, and I know I couldn’t have done anything, but at least we could have been there for him.”
Rationally, Wysong says, she totally gets why visitation had to be stopped at nursing homes.
But on a gut level: “They took away my right to hold his hand. I felt cheated. And guilty. I can only hope he died in his sleep. But I’ll never know. Never know what it was like for him. And that’s terrible.”
Culturally, Lee says, we don’t “allow these two things to coexist: ‘I understand but I’m still mad about it.’ We’re pretty intolerant of that. But just because one thing is right, it can still go against something else we believe in. No one’s wrong here. It’s just how you feel.”
And it’s bored into our very DNA. Family units are the bedrock of our species, and our roles and responsibilities are deeply ingrained.
“To be there. To show support. To physically touch. To say goodbye. When we’re not able to fulfill those roles we feel guilt,” Lee said. “And in this case, a sense of injustice.”
Lee says there’s no telling how many people “are grappling with these mixed emotions right now.”
Just consider the number of coronovirus deaths — 90,000plus in the U.S., 1,000-plus in Virginia — where victims typically died in hospitals with no family allowed for fear of contagion.
That’s a cauldron of disenfranchised grief, which boils over in the form of anger and “displacement of blame,” Lee said. “A lot of front-line people get that taken out on them — the people in charge, the caretakers.”
Leslie Finch doesn’t think she’s as mad as she is sad. She missed the birth of her first grandchild and, six weeks later, still hasn’t been able to hold the little girl.
“I don’t want to sound like a wuss — so many people have had it so much worse,” Finch said. “But every time I see a commercial with a newborn, I tear up.”
In anticipation of the April birth — her daughter lives in Maryland — Finch had been self-quarantining since late February at her Larchmont home in Norfolk.
“I didn’t want anything to keep me away from that baby.”
Also: “My mother died when I was 11 so I didn’t have her with me when I had my children. I’m sure that’s part of what made me feel like I really needed to be there for my daughter.”
But with each passing week the pandemic only tightened its grip — with Finch’s own doctor even testing positive for the virus.
A week after the baby was born, Finch couldn’t take it anymore. She and her husband drove four hours to their daughter’s house, where they sat on the porch in 45-degree weather and stared at the baby through a sliding glass door.
“It’s one thing to have your own child, but when your child has a child it means as much or more,” Finch said.
Her daughter sends pictures, which show how much the baby has already changed, Finch said.
“She’s smiling. Lifting her head. I’m feeling like I’ve missed one of the most important events of my life. And I understand the reasons, but I’m left with ‘it’s still not fair.’”
Offering perspective doesn’t usually help, Lee said.
“If someone has a toothache, it doesn’t do any good to tell them about how the old Romans couldn’t do anything except knock out a tooth like that. That kind of reflection is a philosopher’s dream. It requires distance, and pain is immediate and highly personal. To compare someone’s suffering to someone else’s is like telling them to just get over it. It’s minimizing — not acknowledging — their pain.”
Time can soothe but wounds can reopen.
“Like anything else this virus can come and go, but things will come up and remind you of your inability to play that role for that person,” Lee said. “That’s why anniversaries and holidays are busy for mental health professionals. They’re supposed to be happy times, but they’re also reminders of what you’re supposed to do for the people you love. I can only imagine what all this will do down the line.”
The usual advice for any kind of grief is “don’t stay home and ruminate, because that will suck you right into depression,” Lee said.
But disenfranchised grief during the isolation of an ongoing pandemic?
That’s a particularly tough combination.
Virtual support groups can be good medicine. Talking is therapeutic, especially with others struggling through the same type of thing.
Hearing similar stories helps people “normalize — realize — that this is the situation and they’re not bad people because they respected society’s rules during a pandemic,” Lee said.
“You’re not a terrible daughter because you didn’t force your way into the hospital — which you couldn’t have done anyway.
“The ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’ has to stop.”