Risk and Resilience in the Days of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Today, an interest in the period of history known as the Great Depression is revived under conditions of a plague-like virus that is threatening human life and livelihood across the world. The knowledge that so many will die and so many will be burying loved ones is frightening. The young and old alike are having nightmares and anxiety attacks.

Given the risk to health care workers of contracting the disease and exposing their families, the stress to these professionals is considerable. Their constant exposure to death and intense suffering can be unendurable and traumatic as they fight against time to save people who can no longer breathe on their own.

One wonders what the mental health risks are to the general public, especially to children, in a world in which the fight against germs has become an all-consuming obsession, when germ phobia is now the norm. Everywhere adults are madly spraying disinfectants on doorknobs, tables, grocery bags, groceries, and avoiding other people like the plague.

Yes, it is like a plague. Many older people are shut up in their houses. Others walk outside covered in face masks and gloves. The fear of germs is as infectious as the germs themselves. Turn on the TV and the news is saturated with frightening medical reports, grim statistics on the disease spread, and interviews with grieving family members who have lost loved ones to the virus. Images of hastily constructed morgues fill the screen as reporters discuss the problem of where to put all the bodies. There is no comfort in the interviews with overworked, distraught nurses and doctors. Even if you don’t get sick, the anxiety-ridden environment itself is conducive to trauma.

The public health crisis is compounded by an economic crisis. As businesses have closed to prevent the spread of germs, unemployment rates have surged. Financial worries and inadequate or absent health care coverage keep people awake at night. To live in a constant state of tension week after week takes a heavy toll on the body as well as the mind. Meanwhile, the confinement of families at home can lead to conflict and there are media reports of a rise in cases of domestic violence.

History shows us that regular exposure to a hostile and fear-inducing environment can be devastating in its consequences. It can bring out the worst in people in the absence of strong insulating or protective compensatory factors.

We know that the Black Death of 1348 led to mass hysteria and displaced aggression onto minority groups of people who were forced to migrate. Reportedly, in 2020 there are public attacks of Asian people in the belief they were the cause of the pestilence. In China, reportedly, people of African origin are being scapegoated.

We know from social science that prolonged isolation is associated with depression and in situations of high anxiety, the absence of support systems is problematic. In the present context of the pandemic, in addition to the threat of contacting the dread disease, most people are socially isolated to varying degrees, and many are experiencing serious financial strain. The psychological risks are real.

There is no way we can know at the present time what the long-term consequences will be of the international pandemic. We can draw on risk and resilience theory, however, for some clues about recovery. Risk and resilience theory looks at the risks of psychological distress and how people can manage to avoid long-term damage to their mental health and sense of well-being.

A Resilience Framework

Resilience theory has its origins in research on children who had been exposed to psychological trauma stemming from a pattern of abuse or other situations of severe stress. The research was longitudinal to determine the impact of the trauma over time (from childhood into middle adulthood).

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Individuals who had emerged seemingly unscathed were subjected to a closer investigation for the purpose of identifying protective factors in the resiliency. So what set the resilient youth apart from their counterparts who were not able to overcome their painful experiences?

The key factors in later success in life were found to be: a good-natured temperament; a relationship with a trustworthy older person who gave them encouragement; and involvement in an external support system such as a church, school, or youth group that provided a sense of belonging.

The term resilience refers to overcoming adversity in terms of successful adaptation to negative life events, trauma, stress, or risk. People who are resilient draw on their own internal resources and aptitudes, and on external supports such as mutual aid networks.

Dennis Saleebey, in his book, The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice, states that resilience is not the cheerful disregard of one’s difficult and traumatic life experiences or of one’s personal pain; rather, it is the ability to bear up despite these ordeals. Resilience, he further states, is a process—the continuing growth of ‘‘capacity, knowledge, insight, and virtues derived through meeting the demands and challenges of one’s world, however chastening."

Researchers who are studying resilience within a socially oppressive environment are really studying not the impact of one traumatic event but the impact of a whole constellation of events. And their focus is apt to be on entire communities in their recovery or ability to bounce back from the shattering experience.

From an Afrocentric perspective, Robert Hill (2007) directs our attention to cultural traits that have helped people of color survive within the context of societal oppression and social exclusion. Respect for family, high regard for the elderly, an emphasis on education, religiosity, self-confidence, and a strong positive identity with their racial group are assets commonly found among persons who have managed to successfully overcome social and economic obstacles.

Regular exposure to a toxic, dehumanizing environment, of course, is unhealthy and can bring out the worst in people in the absence of strong insulating or protective compensatory factors. Risk-and-resilience theory reveals how, within a hostile structural environment, an ethnic family’s cultural values and social nurturing can function as protective factors to reduce risk and enhance adaptation.

Resilience, like oppression, is both a psychological and a sociological phenomenon for an individual growing up in a racially hostile environment. Ethnically and racially diverse families and communities can help children cope with discrimination by teaching them means of resisting the oppression and by helping them to avoid internalizing harmful messages. A little-known clue to the resilience commonly found among older African American survivors of early-life racial oppression may be, as Hill suggests, the possession of social competence. This quality involves being pro-active against life’s blows.

There is much we can learn of resilience through obtaining oral histories of survivors of cruel circumstances. Gerontological narratives tell us a lot about the nature of resilience across the lifespan and how the lessons of survival learned early in life can serve a protective function as elders face the vicissitudes of old age.

The oral histories contained in The Maid Narratives (LSU Press), as I described in a previous post here, reveals how residents of a black community in Iowa who had migrated from post-slavery Mississippi during the years of the Great Depression could go on to lead productive and fulfilling lives. As they looked back on their hardships, these women made comments such as, “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything” or “I learned the value of education.” For them, these storytellers, their lives held a special meaning.

The purpose of obtaining these personal narratives was to learn the details of working as servants in white families in the segregated South. What was surprising was the almost total lack of bitterness expressed by the narrators as they described the many daily cruelties and challenges of the age. They had played a role in history, and they wanted future generations to know that fact.

Listening to the oral histories of these resilient women of the Great Migration can be inspiring to us today in our moment in history. Future generations will have many questions to ask. Social scientists might record oral histories in 50 years or so to learn what it was like to live in seclusion, or alternatively, to perform high-risk work in hospitals as the death toll climbed rapidly. The researchers undoubtedly will note the courage and resourcefulness of the survivors, how ordinary people found extraordinary to make do as most of the services in modern life had shut down—churches, parks, schools, restaurants, and other businesses, etc. They might even note how people in the pandemic of 2020 themselves found solace in reading about the history of earlier disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, oppressive regimes, the Spanish Flu of 1918, and resilient black women of the Great Depression.