Podcast: Dealing With Post-pandemic Trauma

We’ve all been suffering during the coronavirus pandemic in one way or another, and as the U.S. starts to emerge, we’ll need to reckon with that. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong discusses his piece on pandemic trauma, how to think about it, and what he’s learned through talking with psychiatrists and other experts.

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity:

James Hamblin: So now you’re back from working on your book and writing about the pandemic again. Your first piece back on the subject is about the trauma of the moment. And how are you defining the trauma of the pandemic?

Yeah, I think this has clearly been an intensely stressful 14 months. The pandemic uprooted so much of our lives. It caused sickness and death. Like I say in the piece, there is an ongoing debate among psychologists and psychiatrists about how to define the word . And one of the people I spoke to talks about “big-” and “little-” trauma. Big- is like what you would officially classify as trauma. So, like, death, injury—people who have obviously been very sick from COVID-19, people who’ve lost loved ones to COVID-19. And then there are all the sorts of little- traumas, the things that we might colloquially call traumas that are undoubtedly influential on mental health, things like losing a job, being isolated from your loved ones, being