Diseases don’t just attack the body. Outbreaks often create a shadow pandemic of psychological and societal injuries, which also maim, kill and devastate families. And the underlying tragedy of this carnage is that we could stop it – if only we cared.
America has always treated mental illness in dramatically different and discriminatory ways compared to physical illnesses. But amidst a pandemic, that inequality has caused unprecedented, widespread suffering.
In March 2020, when Congress passed $2 trillion in emergency coronavirus aid, few news outlets noted the absence of funding for the mental crisis about to hit America. “You have to do something. People are going to die,” a federal government official told me.
I spent the year that followed exposing how America’s mental health system was failing amid the pandemic and the people dying as a result. I immersed myself in the lives of those abandoned to wrestle on their own with substance use. I talked to nursing homes residents witnessing their own minds deteriorating in isolation. I listened as many people described their new struggle against the sudden impulse to kill themselves.
By collecting our own data, the stories broke new ground and helped quantify what many experts had previously only suspected.
At the same time, they exposed how little the Trump administration and other leaders were doing about the growing crisis – even as they repeatedly used the excuse of suicides to reopen non-essential businesses like tattoo parlors and bowling alleys.