The Mental Health Toll of Another Mass Shooting
BU psychology professor on ways to check in on your and your loved ones’ mental health after Lewiston
“Numbness” Is Normal: The Mental Health Toll of Another Mass Shooting
BU psychology professor on ways to check in on your and your loved ones’ mental health after Lewiston
Just absorb this number—the Lewiston, Maine, mass shooting October 25 was the 565th mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four victims were shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter. The ongoing backdrop of violence in this country hampers everyone’s sense of safety and well-being.
While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM—referred to as the Bible of psychology—doesn’t consider media exposure of a violent event as trauma, experts agree that repeated shootings in public places and realistic active-shooter drills in schools are leaving children and adults scarred and frightened.
With the news of another mass shooting so fresh, BU Today reached out to Laurie Craigen, a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine associate professor of mental health counseling. Craigen researches self-injurious behavior and secondary traumatic stress, or the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another.
Q&A
with Laurie Craigen
BU Today: What effect does hearing news of these mass shootings and the subsequent stress that comes from it have on the body?
Craigen: It depends. You may have physical proximity to a shooting—I went to college in Maine, or I know someone who lives there—or psychological proximity—I had a past trauma—and a new trauma can exacerbate symptoms. You also need to think about your exposure to the shooting and how often you are watching the news. All of those things matter.
There is a cascade of symptoms that someone may experience based on just some of those things I mentioned. What I see most often right now is numbness. There is no one-size-fits-all-all model for how we experience trauma. Some of us have gotten almost immune to this. Some of my clients will even say, ‘I’m embarrassed; I’m ashamed that I’m not having a stronger reaction.’ But the reaction is the numbness, which I think a lot of us can relate to.
BU Today: Do children and adults process this kind of news differently?
Craigen: Sometimes children will see the news, and for the next three days, they will be super anxious. What happens is the executive functioning part of our brain that is dedicated to learning becomes sort of downregulated and then the brain is focused on our anxiety. So when those threat perceptions are increased, the stress responses in the body are activated. So learning is affected. With teenagers and adults, we see more anxiety, agitation, avoidance, nightmares, diet changes, impacts on sleep, irritability, and withdrawals. A lot of people will avoid places because their fear is so strong.
BU Today: What kind of work do you do with patients?
Craigen: In my clinical practice, I work with trauma in general, whether that is direct trauma from violence, or with people who have experienced secondary trauma, meaning hearing the stories that cause trauma-like symptoms.
I have clients who just can’t stop watching, and they develop these trauma-like symptoms. They may be based on earlier proximity, physical and psychological past traumas, their own baseline of anxiety or depression, if they have a depressive disorder already, or if they currently have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. Just simply seeing a trauma that looks like theirs can cause those PTSD symptoms.
BU Today: Much of your work focuses on secondary, or collective, trauma. What is this?
Craigen: With secondary trauma, you aren’t experiencing it firsthand, but you’re experiencing it through the media. Even watching it on the news could be a trigger, based on whether somebody has past trauma experiences. But within this context, we’re talking about our current reality, where we’re in a public health and a mental health crisis, particularly with our youth. And we have this cascade of all of these collective traumas related to mass shootings, sociopolitical [debates], fractions around the world, the pandemic. We’re talking about these layerings of traumas that are impacting us. And so when these things happen, I think it’s also important to be aware that we’re not at a full tank right now. And many of us are suffering. I’ve never been busier in my clinical practice.
In my clinical practice, in the aftermath of these events, parents will come into my session in tears, and say, ‘I know I gotta send my kid to school, or this concert, but I don’t know if I can,’ and so just the tremendous anxiety of parents that I’m seeing. I’ve never seen it before, from this collective threat of violence.
I’ve been reading up on this idea that when humans are faced with a big, big problem, and we don’t see change in our society, it almost becomes this learned helplessness. We say, ‘I feel like I can’t have an impact,’ and so people’s reaction seems to be dulled because they feel like they can’t do anything about it.
BU Today: How should you talk to your children about this news?
Craigen: Kids are very smart. And they tend to do better when we are honest with them. Kids are better off having their parents talk to them about the news before they hear it from someone else or in the media. People will often say, ‘Well, my kid didn’t bring it up.’ But I think that saying, ‘Do you have any questions, any fears, do you want to talk about it?’ is really helpful for kids.
BU Today: And when should people stop assuming they are OK, and seek help?
Craigen: People are resilient, and so just by experiencing trauma, or witnessing trauma, it does not mean that we will develop trauma-like symptoms or post-traumatic stress disorder. Oftentimes it takes several months for those symptoms to show up.
You don’t need to push the processing immediately on people. But I do think sometimes our kids’ brains are having trouble processing and finding language or finding a safe place to talk about it. And so if there is a desire, or if you feel like you’re being impacted, or your anxiety or trauma symptoms are increasing, it would be hugely beneficial to seek support. I think understanding what resources are available is really important for families in schools and other systems. If you start to notice your child or your colleague more distracted, anxious, or perseverating on the violence or the trauma, you should intervene and support them in getting some help.
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