On television screens, social media posts and the pages of newspapers, it is impossible, it seems, to escape the relentless bombardment of images of last week’s fatal shootings in Dallas, Minnesota and Louisiana, and it is affecting people’s psychological health, experts said Monday.
“We have a nation that is extremely impacted,” said Dr. Andrew Williams, mental health services program manager for Riverside University Health System-Behavioral Health.
And to cope with the disturbing developments, Williams and others said, people need to just turn the TV off.
People shouldn’t unplug entirely. They should stay engaged with their community and the world, experts said.
But Alison Holman, interim director of UC Irvine’s nursing science program, said, “It’s really important not to play over and over and over again the news that is tragic.”
Dr. Merritt Dean Schreiber, a psychologist in the Department of Pediatrics at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, said some schools of thought suggest repeated media exposure of tragedy may go so far as to trigger post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“That’s not fully resolved yet,” Schreiber said.
COLORING OUR WORLD
What is clear, though, he said, is that such exposure can harm one’s psychological health.
“If we’re not careful, that can really color our vision of the world,” he said.
Experts said the amount of stress is directly related to the amount of media immersion.
“We know from our research,” Holman said, “that the more hours you engage with media coverage of tragic events, the higher your acute stress levels will be.”
[For more of this story, written by David Downey, go to http://www.dailynews.com/gener...t-way-to-feel-better]
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