Anne Messman, a veteran emergency room physician in Detroit, knew something was wrong when she developed insomnia and became unusually irritated with people she loved.
Messman and thousands of other healthcare workers across the United States are grappling with psychological traumas that mental health professionals say are more commonly associated with soldiers returning home from far-flung battlefields.
The unrelenting horror of COVID-19 has exacted a toll on healthcare workers who have seen patient after patient succumb to a disease that has killed more than 75,000 people in the United States alone in little more than two months.
Reuters interviewed eight doctors and eight nurses who said either they or their colleagues have been experiencing some combination of panic, anxiety, grief, numbness, irritability, insomnia and nightmares when they do sleep.
"Burnout, anxiety, depression, or irritability or moral injury, those can easily happen to anyone when you’re exposed to these kinds of circumstances for an extended period of time," said Major Olli Toukolehto, a psychiatrist at the U.S. military’s 531st Hospital Center who has been deployed to New York
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