‘Your soul gets torn.’ Mental health of medical workers may be COVID-19’s second wave
Health care workers have been working tirelessly for months to help those suffering from the wrath of the new coronavirus, but surveys show they, too, are struggling to stay afloat.
Some nurses, physicians and other staff are exhausted, stressed and worried about limited personal protective equipment, unfair decisions regarding who receives care over others and the possibilities of infecting their families once their long shifts are over.
But this burden will only get worse as the number of infections continues to soar, Roy Perlis, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Science Magazine.
“We have to try to flatten this curve, but then there’s a second curve we’re going to have to flatten: the mental health consequences of the pandemic,” Perlis told the magazine.
Past public health crises and events like the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, have revealed the mind-numbing power of the jobs of health care workers.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003 showed that 89% of Hong Kong medical workers reported feeling exhausted and admitted fear of social contact after the storm calmed down, according to a study in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry that included 271 participants.
The attack on the Twin Towers in New York also taught researchers that forcing people to recall the event and discuss their feelings about it may hurt more than help, a study by the American Psychological Association said.
Similar research is important to aid in the development of different therapies for health care workers in the future, experts say.
Lisa Neuburger, a 37-year-old nurse in Minnesota, had to move out of her parents’ home and into a camper for the duration of the pandemic, McClatchy News reported. She made the decision after a coronavirus patient’s ventilator tube detached, possibly exposing her to fluid from the person’s lungs.
“I couldn’t sleep that night,” Neuburger told the Associated Press. “I thought, ‘If I brought this home to my mom, she’s probably going to die, and it’s probably going to be my fault.’ So I had to find a different way.”
Over half of 1,379 health care workers in Italy — the country with the most coronavirus fatalities after the U.S. — reported feeling post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, according to a non-peer-reviewed study posted Wednesday on the server medRxiv.
Female workers and those who had a colleague who was hospitalized, quarantined, or died suffered most from mental health issues, the study said.
“I can’t afford the luxury of going back to my quarantined house, I have to go to work and do my part. You do yours, I ask you please,” Alessia Bonari, a nurse from Tuscany, Italy, wrote on an Instagram post, CBS News reported. “I am physically tired because the protective devices are bad, the lab coat makes you sweat and once dressed I can no longer go to the bathroom or drink for six hours.”
Research also shows that the “body-draining fatigue” most health care professionals experience on the job can hurt patients’ safety, according to a 2009 study in the journal Pharmacy and Therapeutics.
So much so, that “prolonged wakefulness can degrade performance, leaving health care professionals with the equivalent of a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%,” the study said, “which is above the legal limit for driving in most states.”
Another study observed a sleep-deprived anesthesiologist who showed behaviors associated with microsleep — periods of sleep that last from a few to several seconds — during more than 30% of a four-hour procedure, the 2009 study referenced.
“Nevertheless, human errors will still happen,” the researchers said. “The best solution probably requires a systems approach that both limits the causes of fatigue in the workforce and reduces the potential for human error.”
Burló Arévalo, an intensive care unit nurse in Tarragona, Spain, told Science Magazine that she feels a mixture of fear, sadness and helplessness while on the job.
“Who am I to decide who gets to live and die?” Arévalo told the magazine. “When you see that you have to leave people to die because the resources are not enough, your soul gets torn.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 9:43 AM with the headline "‘Your soul gets torn.’ Mental health of medical workers may be COVID-19’s second wave."
