By Ilana Siyance
NYC’s busy hustle and bustle regularly affords its residents with a generous dose of anxiety, but the novel coronavirus pandemic has kicked it up several notches. New Yorkers are not used to being cramped in at home in isolation. Social distancing is bringing families are roommates too close for comfort. Moreover, people have been losing their jobs, some are sick or grieving. Fear of illness and economic woes top it all off.
As per a recent article in the NY Times, New York’s mental health mental health professionals say the problem is real, and overwhelming even for them. “Never have I ever gone through a trauma at the same time as my clients,” said Melissa Nesle, a psychotherapist in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “All I am hearing all day, hour after hour, is what I am experiencing also.” Ms. Nesle said that at times her patients seem hesitant to unload their troubles, knowing she is in the same boat. “They are aware to some extent that I am sitting in a New York City apartment, too,” she said. “So I will say to them, ‘Yes this is really stressful; I feel you; I hear it.’ But I want to reassure them that I am OK.” She added, though,“I am not always.”
New York city’s health professionals have been scrambled to adapt to social distancing in sessions. Thanks to congress’s emergency legislation passed in early March allowed psychologists to use telehealth treatment in lieu of in-person sessions. To maintain client confidentiality, however, some of the professionals are forced to hold the phone, zoom or Facetime meetings from their cars or even closets, to find space away from their households. Other therapists have found too much in common with their patients. They have been juggling their patients’ anguish while sometimes managing their own grief from the loss of elderly relatives or parents.
So now, the emotional health of mental health professionals seems to be shaken, due to the virus-oriented anxiety they face at home and again at work. “I am so used to feeling angry or sad or a moment of joy for my patients, and this was a completely different experience,” said Dr. Lucy Hutner, a psychiatrist who specializes in women’s mental health. “I realized what it was: It was just all of the fear and the panic and the trauma and the stress that I had been absorbing from every side.”
NYC therapists are practicing the very coping techniques that they preach, like breathing, meditating and reaching out to their own mentors. They leave time between sessions for a walk, take break when possible, and try to maintain routine.
Dr. Donna Demetri Friedman, the executive director at Mosaic Mental Health in the Bronx, says her patients have even more to deal with than most. The low-income residents in the neighborhood don’t have the computers or even ample cell phone credits to be in touch with a therapist. Further, African Americans and Latinos make up 62 percent of NYC’s coronavirus deaths, though they account for only 51 percent of the population, as per data from the city’s health department. “I do a lot of self-care so that I don’t take on the intensity of what we see day to day,” Dr. Friedman said. “But with this, it’s so pervasive, there’s so much death, there is so much uncertainty, the helplessness can creep in, in ways that it typically doesn’t. We are doing everything and anything to help each other and our patients to get through this,” she added. “Sometimes, that’s crying together.”
