APRIL 10, 2020
As a critical care doctor in New York City, Monica is used to dealing with high-octane situations and treating severely ill patients. But she says the COVID-19 outbreak is unlike anything she’s seen before. Over the past few weeks, operating rooms have been transformed into ICUs, physicians of all backgrounds have been drafted into emergency room work, and two of her colleagues became ICU patients. While Monica is proud of her coworkers for rising to the challenge, she says it’s been hard for them to fight a prolonged battle against a deadly, highly contagious illness with no known cure.
To make matters worse, Monica recently tested positive for COVID-19, and she believes she brought the virus home to her husband. Both have gotten sick and are improving, but he had a much harder time with the disease than she did. Monica says that, while she’s used the inherent risk of her job, she feels her hospital failed to protect her and her family — and she blames herself, in part, for her husband’s illness. “There’s this sinking feeling that you have,” says Monica, who requested anonymity because she feared professional repercussions for speaking candidly, “not only, like, the hospital let you down, and that the system let us down as doctors and didn’t protect us, but then I didn’t protect my own family.”
In hospitals around the world, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers like Monica are fighting an enemy that has already killed more than 95,000 people, including over 16,000 in the United States. And as with any war, the fight against COVID-19 will result not just in direct casualties, but also take a terrible toll on the minds of many of those who survive.
It will be years before the mental health toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is fully understood, but some early data already paints a bleak picture. A study published March 23 in the medical journal JAMA found that, among 1,257 healthcare workers working with COVID-19 patients in China, 50.4% reported symptoms of depression, 44.6% symptoms of anxiety, 34% insomnia, and 71.5% reported distress. Nurses and other frontline workers were among those with the most severe symptoms.
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