YAMHILL, Ore. — As more vaccinated Americans emerge, blinking, to survey our post-apocalyptic world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens may never fully recover — even if they didn’t actually contract the coronavirus.
That’s because quite apart from the direct effects of the virus, the pandemic has aggravated mental illness, domestic violence, addiction and childhood trauma in ways that may reverberate for decades.
My friends who started out prosperous have ridden out the storm in vacation homes and seen their investments soar. Here in rural Oregon where I grew up, my friends who were already down and out are mostly struggling, homeless or even dead, and there is similar anguish across a broad swath of the United States.
That’s why President Biden’s proposals to invest in families and working-class Americans are so important. Just as we acted forcefully to address the virus, we should also move decisively to address America’s persistent pandemic of despair, addiction and educational failure.
Two of my friends overdosed on heroin during the pandemic, and the girlfriend of one is now self-medicating with meth and is wanted by the law. One of my homeless friends died; another, newly homeless, begs me for money; his mother pleads for me to refuse for fear he will use it to buy drugs and again overdose.
A social worker in Oregon told me of a vulnerable family recently devastated:
A 9-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister already were facing challenges before the virus arrived, for their mom was wrestling with drug addiction and no longer much in their lives. But their dad was trying hard to fill that void, and they were getting by.
Then the father lost his restaurant job early in the pandemic, so he was home with the kids as they grappled with remote schooling. With the financial stress and constant time together, they got on one another’s nerves. He wanted to be a good dad, but he drank too much and couldn’t always control his anger or cope with life’s strains.
Then one day this spring the dad spent an excruciating hour stuck on hold while calling the state employment office; he finally slammed the phone down in frustration. The kids were hungry — perhaps a bit whiny — and demanded lunch, so he started to make them something. He was also tipsy, and he got into a heated argument with his children about their mother.
At that point, he lost it. He placed his hands around his 11-year-old’s neck and began to strangle her. The younger daughter rushed to her sister’s rescue, and the father hit them both while shouting curses that he didn’t mean.
“I’m done with you!” the father yelled to his children. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
The kids ran to the house of a neighbor, who called 911. They have no broken bones, but they won’t easily forget the trauma of being attacked by their dad — he had been their responsible parent! — or their ache and fear as they were placed in a shelter pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.
The father is remorseful and blames the alcohol. It’s a tragedy for the entire family, and if it hadn’t been for the coronavirus, he would have been at work, the children would have been at school, and he wouldn’t have had that frustrating phone call.
While children in rich families were being tutored individually at home, this family was imploding.
That is what the virus did: It seized upon America’s inequality and hugely magnified it.
*
This indirect toll of the virus can’t yet be calculated. But the pain spans all regions of the country, urban and rural areas alike, reverberating in myriad complicated ways: A teenage girl cuts herself, frazzled parents exchange blows, a boy is shot as murder rates rise.
The clearest secondary effect is an increase in drug use, for the number of Americans dying from overdoses set another record, an estimated 91,000 for the 12 months ending in October.
That’s because in-person counseling and support groups were suspended, because many people felt more anxious and stressed and because so many Americans feel isolated and lonely. So they self-medicate.
Across the country, there’s growing concern about fentanyl overdoses arising from the isolation. The Beaverton school district near here warned recently that “we’ve lost several students to fentanyl-related poisonings.”
Alcohol kills even more Americans than drug overdoses do, and sales figures and surveys suggest that problem drinking has risen significantly during the pandemic.
Suicide is more complicated. It’s too early to have solid data, but preliminary figures indicate that suicide fell 5 percent in 2020, and the organization Crisis Text Line reported fewer inquiries mentioning suicide. Conversely, visits to emergency rooms because of children’s mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Young people seem hit particularly hard, with one survey finding that more than a quarter said they “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days.” By comparison, in 2018, 11 percent said they seriously considered suicide at some point in the previous year.
Part of the divergence by wealth and class is simply that stress has risen among those who are hungry or at risk of losing homes. David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth, noted that 18 million Americans sometimes or often don’t have enough to eat, according to census data. More than 11 million are behind on rent or mortgage payments.
Significant increases in domestic violence have been reported during the pandemic, partly linked to increased drinking at home.
Child abuse is more difficult to gauge. Most experts I talked to believe that physical abuse (though perhaps not sexual abuse) has increased along with addiction and stress, but this view isn’t universal. In any case, the cancellation of in-person instruction has meant that abuse of children is less visible and they have fewer opportunities to confide in an adult to get help.
“In this pandemic we’re all isolated, so kids haven’t had that connection with that safe neighbor or the Sunday school teacher,” said Russell Mark, who runs a shelter for abused children, Juliette’s House, in McMinnville, Ore. “So kids have no place to turn.”
“We have a huge number of walking wounded,” he added.
School closures also mean something very basic: Many disadvantaged kids aren’t learning. One study warned that three million children in the United States have missed all formal education, remote or in-person, for a year.
“Some kids we just lose,” Melissa Rysemus, the principal of Interagency Academy, an alternative school in Seattle, told me. During more than a year of remote instruction, only about half of the school’s children attended classes, and some of them didn’t turn on their cameras.
Two of Rysemus’s students were killed during the pandemic, one shot by a boyfriend and one shot in his doorway for unknown reasons.
One way to assess the impact on children is to count “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. These can be a parent beating or regularly swearing at a child or partner, or parents divorcing or abusing drugs or alcohol. Many children have one ACE, but those who have several are more likely as adults to suffer from cancer, heart disease and other ailments, as well as to abuse drugs, miss work or even kill themselves.
Several child experts told me that the pandemic has been an ACE machine, with more domestic violence, drug abuse and turmoil in homes, in addition to about 40,000 children losing a parent to Covid-19 itself. Given what we know about ACEs, today’s traumatized children may suffer increased risks for decades to come, and some may transmit the disadvantage to the next generation.
*
I’ve been worrying during this pandemic about an old friend of mine, whom I’ll call Dell. He’s smart and charming, but his grandfather was an alcoholic, and his father — a wonderful friend of mine — abused drugs and alcohol until his death six years ago. Dell started using drugs at 12, burglarizing homes to support his habit, but then three years ago, he turned over a new leaf.
Dell was a star of a recovery program, got a job, avoided drugs for more than two years and was a fantastic dad to his two children. My wife and I told him about research on the importance of talking to infants, and he began speaking to his kids constantly.
In February 2020 on the eve of the pandemic, I saw him and his new wife, and he told me he had been promoted to be a manager. We embraced and celebrated: He was going to be the one to break the cycle! His kids would thrive!
Then Covid-19 arrived, and he no longer could attend support meetings and no longer had to take urine tests — “no support and no accountability,” as his mother put it. Dell received some wrenching personal news and coped by shooting heroin. He overdosed, and the hospital barely brought him back to life.
Dell returned to drugs, and his baby soon had to get medical treatment for somehow ingesting meth when his parents were high. In quick succession, Dell lost his job, lost the baby to foster care, lost his apartment and gave up his other son to be raised by others.
A good man who loved his children and had been doing so well had seen his life collapse and was now living in his car with his new wife. His baby is now being put up for adoption.
“Life is bleak and I did it to myself,” he texted me recently. “Living in a 1996 Honda Civic and not seeing my kids because I don’t have a roof is the worst.” He asked me to help by investing in a scheme he had devised to house people in shipping containers.
“If you would go out on a limb for us,” he said, “it might just save our lives.”
I was heartsick, but Dell’s mother, who herself has been drug-free for six years, begged me not to give him money or anything that he could sell; she fears that the proceeds would go to drugs that would kill him. The best hope to save his life, she said wretchedly, is for him to be arrested and go through detox.
“I’ve never seen him this bad,” his mother told me.
*
This column may seem like a depressing read, but the truth is that while people relapse into addiction, they also, miraculously, pull themselves out — with help.
Years ago in Nashville I met Shelia Simpkins, who was trafficked into prostitution at the age of 6. She spent many years enslaved by violent pimps, struggling with addiction and repeatedly getting arrested but finally left with the help of a program called Thistle Farms. She earned a B.A. and helped countless other women start over.
Since the pandemic began, Simpkins completed her master’s in social work at Tennessee State University and was recently appointed head of residential services for Thistle Farms and to the board of the National Trafficking Sheltered Alliance. She exemplifies the grit, resilience and potential that are deeply woven into the human fabric.
The toll of the pandemic should underscore the importance of Biden’s three-part proposal to invest in America and Americans. The coronavirus has interacted with half a century of inequality, despair and family dysfunction to shatter those who were already fragile. We should fight back with vaccines and P.P.E., yes, but also with policies to address the underlying inequality of opportunity.
No set of policies can solve all the problems, but Biden’s three-part proposal would invest heavily in left-behind Americans and give needy children a hand up.
The blunt truth is that it is difficult to heal adults like Dell who have wrestled with addiction for many years and have limited education or job experience. The best time to have helped Dell was when he was 3, or perhaps 13, not now that he is an adult raising his own children. As an adage attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Frederick Douglass puts it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Biden’s child tax credits could reduce America’s staggering rates of child poverty by about half. High-quality pre-K would be a lifeline for children in chaotic homes. Child care would make it easier for parents to hold jobs. Bandwidth-for-all would allow families access to the internet. Free community college would lead to better jobs and stronger families. Investments in health care would make it easier for parents to get drug treatment and mental health support.
Melissa Teague was the longtime girlfriend of an old neighbor of mine, Keylan Knapp, a good man who died of a heroin overdose as the pandemic began. Melissa’s father also abused drugs, and she has herself been wrestling with addiction since she was 13, when she was prescribed painkillers for migraines.
“Now it’s kind of a way of living,” she told me.
Sweet and shy, Melissa has served prison sentences for drug-related offenses, and she also suffers from anxiety. Keylan’s death complicated everything, for she (wrongly) blamed herself. “I miss him so much,” she lamented. “Every day seems to get harder.”
“I had to take an anxiety pill to call you,” she added. Because of her anxiety, she said, she missed a court appearance and is wanted by the police.
Melissa adores her 14-year-old son, and her foremost goal is to see him flourish and avoid the minefields that now represent her life.
“I’m tired of drugs killing everyone I love,” she said.
That’s how I feel, too. The pandemic has shown more than ever that we inhabit two Americas, but finally this year we have a fighting chance to adopt policies that can help those left behind — especially children. As we end the coronavirus pandemic, we also have a chance to tackle the pandemic of despair and inequality that holds back so many Americans.
Melissa is trying to be upbeat. “I just keep reminding myself that God is working behind the scenes, even though I may not see anything good,” she mused. She promised me that she wouldn’t overdose, and the next day she summoned the courage to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
She was feeling hope, knowing that there is a better path forward. We as a nation just have to take it.
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