The PTSD-like Affliction That’s Traumatizing Health Care Workers
The invisible wounds of moral injury run deep for those on the front lines
“Some experiences imprint themselves beyond where language can speak.” These are the words of psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. This is also the experience of many health care workers ensnared in the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I just can’t… can’t find the words… there simply are none,” whispered a doctor friend working in a hospital in New York City’s viral epicenter. We were Zooming — both of our backgrounds dark. Through the screen’s dim glow, I watched her head fall into her hands and rock back and forth. Her shoulders slumped forward, and she started to shake.
Marie, I’ll call her, and I had worked together in California’s Bay Area when I was doing palliative care chaplaincy and clinical ethics work. She was never at a loss for words. In fact, to call her highly verbal would be an understatement. And yet what she has recently witnessed, been forced to do, and could not prevent on the Covid-19 front line has brought about some kind of internal preternatural silence. “It’s as if part of my soul had been shredded with a knife,” she told me when she finally could speak; “the part that holds me in relation to my Hippocratic oath and personal values.”
