‘We all come to work knowing what we signed up for’: How frontline workers manage their mental health during the coronavirus pandemic

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It's not just you -- even this emergency-department physician at Yale needs breaks from talking about the coronavirus.

Christine Ngaruiya was already working on a meditation room as the coronavirus pandemic took hold. “I actually had been working on a meditation room before this all happened,” Ngaruiya, an academic emergency physician in the Yale School of Medicine’s emergency-medicine department and a graduate of Yale’s Public Voices fellowship, told MarketWatch.

She has also stayed connected to her communities in a healthy way. “I’m also a little bit more involved in some of my social media, which primarily focuses on travel, so [I’m] staying connected with people and continuing to share my love of travel on there with the anticipation that with time, like all things, it will return,” she said. “It’s kind of a way to keep the dream alive.”

— A recent JAMA study of health-care workers in China, where the novel coronavirus was first detected late last year A recent JAMA study of 1,257 health-care workers from 34 hospitals across China, where the new coronavirus was first detected late last year, found that substantial shares of participants reported symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia and distress.

“ ‘It’s still unprecedented territory. These patients come in alarmingly ill when they’re sick, and they’re alarmingly ill in a way that you’ve never seen before.’ ”Ngaruiya: It was like watchful waiting — we were waiting for the surge, so to speak. We knew it was coming; we knew a couple of patients probably had it. We didn’t have as many tests at that time. But [a majority of] people were not showing severe symptoms.

In my career in medicine for the past 10 years I have never seen anything like that before. It’s frightening to see that. I will never forget the image of that patient. We all come to work knowing what we signed up for, eager to help and hoping to make a dent in this thing. The wakeup call for me was probably about a month back when this was just all sort of coming to a head. I remember losing an entire afternoon on a group chat about COVID. When I looked up, I realized that my whole day was gone.

MarketWatch: What do you want people to know about what frontline workers like yourself are seeing and experiencing right now? If I’m at the point where I can’t take on another set of challenges from someone’s life, then I’m OK with setting a boundary on that conversation and saying, “Hey, let’s pick this up where we left off another day.”Ngaruiya: People have framed the process that especially those of us at the front line have experienced in the past few weeks as going through the first few phases of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

 

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