A shopping mall in Texas, a private school in Tennessee, a bank in Kentucky and a dance studio in California: these are the sites of some of the public mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 alone, representing just a slice of the presumed safe spaces rocked by these tragedies. As mass shootings in the country have risen, evidence is mounting that they are having a far-reaching mental health impact.
People have a broad range of responses to mass tragedies, says Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the effects of collective trauma and was not involved in the new study. “There are certainly people who go about their day-to-day experiences without thinking about mass shootings at all,” Silver says. Others, she says, change their behavior dramatically, avoiding certain public places or even homeschooling their children.
Rizvi says the frequent lockdowns at her child’s school are a factor in her family’s decision to move to a smaller district, where she hopes smaller schools and more personal attention will reduce the danger. “I know it can happen anywhere,” she says, “but I’m just hoping that maybe from a statistical standpoint, the odds are even slightly smaller.”
Lee’s new work suggests that certain symptoms are associated with poor coping. His new screening questionnaire focuses on five symptoms to determine whether anxiety might be affecting a person’s daily functioning. One symptom is appetite change when thinking about mass shooting, indicating high levels of stress and fear, Lee says. Another is a physical response such as sweating or a pounding heart when thinking about these events.