It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. [View all]
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/covid-grief-trauma-memory-biden-trump/677828/
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https://archive.li/wlrat
America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than theyve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Bidens approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans satisfaction with their personal livesa measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertaintyis at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.
Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe its the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors cant fully account for Americas national malaise. We believe thats because theyre overlooking a crucial factor.
Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; its still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxietythen, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when its not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and angerexactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldnt love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that peoples recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.
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