One side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: Psychological trauma. but we’re more resilient than we think.

One side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: Psychological trauma. but we’re more resilient than we think.

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychological aftermath of mass tragedies for more than two decades. Nearly 60 percent of Americans watched the graphic footage of planes slamming into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Two months later, her studies showed, 17 people of the population outside of New York reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress. “We saw the role the media could play in transmitting trauma beyond the directly impacted communities,” she says.