Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

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Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

April 23, 20201:06 PM ET
Yuki Noguchi


The scene at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx is unlike anything psychiatrist Bruce Schwartz has seen. Everyone, even interns and nurses in training, have been tapped to tend to the flood of COVID-19 patients, who are crashing and dying at rates comparable to the front line of a battlefield.

His hospital treats a highly vulnerable minority population — where rates of obesity and diabetes also run high — meaning infected patients face an especially high risk of death.

"We're very much in the center of the epidemic," Schwartz says. Overworked and burned out, hospital staff are all coping with horrific tragedies playing out multiple times on a single, 12-hour shift. "It is really a very horrendous experience that no one could possibly be prepared for," Schwartz says.

Hospital workers around the world face similar, sustained trauma, and it's taking an emotional toll. A recent study underscored the severity of those risks: Half of Chinese health care workers studied who treated COVID-19 patients earlier this year now suffer from depression. Nearly as many — 44.6% — have anxiety, and a third have insomnia.

Schwartz, who is also president of the American Psychiatric Association, says hospitals like his are offering teletherapy for their own staff. But he expects the need to only grow: "After this epidemic lets up, we're going to see a great deal of post-traumatic stress."

Medical professionals, in other words, will be the patients of tomorrow. And Harvard psychiatrist Roy Perlis worries health care workers will be reluctant to seek care.

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And there's lots of other drama playing out around them: Not every patient gets a lifesaving ventilator, for example. And the medical staff can't clean patients of the tears and saliva that build up on their faces. On his hourlong commute home every day, Villareal is haunted by the constant stream of desperate calls from loved ones. A patient's family members aren't permitted to visit, and Villareal has no time to comfort them.

"We've been so inundated with phone calls, it's hard to talk about the death process with very concerned family members," Villareal says. "Again, these are things that really take you away from feeling like you were a good nurse that day."

Psychologists have a name for that kind of feeling: "Moral injury."

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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/23/840986735/trauma-on-the-pandemics-front-line-leaves-health-workers-reeling?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&fbclid=IwAR30wthiNNeQZLFpi_kSRfznP_VM25WONxOc_ztJhkW_DthNXZ0qKFR9pYQ