Bizu Gelaye, associate professor of epidemiology
By S.I. Rosenbaum | Illustrations by Mary Delaware
In 2014, Bizu Gelaye began to wonder what his life was worth to the country he lived in.
The associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health was watching from his Boston office as the Ebola virus killed thousands of people in West Africa. At the same time, in Ferguson, Missouri, activists were being gassed in the street as they protested the death of just one young man—Michael Brown—at the hands of the police.
Yet neither story seemed to matter much to Americans outside the crises.
“The world wasn’t paying attention,” Gelaye recalls. “Institutions were going on with their daily business as if nothing happened.”
As an Ethiopian immigrant to the U.S., as well as a student of disasters, Gelaye experienced both situations—and the general indifference to the fates of people who looked like him—as more than simple news stories. They were sources of emotional stress, a mental pressure he was constantly aware of.
Then, last summer, it happened again. As COVID-19 was devastating communities of color and videos of police killings were going viral, it seemed that many Americans—including the president—were unconcerned. “Living through the lynching of George Floyd and having another pandemic—it felt like “Groundhog Day,” Gelaye says, and the emotional stress that was so acute in 2014 bubbled back up.
The Burden of Trauma
For Gelaye and countless other Americans, the last five or six years have been nothing if not traumatic—and in ways that overlapped, piled up, and influenced each other. We’ve experienced a divisive and volatile presidential administration; a pandemic that has killed more than 4 million people globally and overwhelmed health systems; historic surges in unemployment and poverty; and a national reckoning on racism, driven by the rise of hate groups and horrific videos of police violence—all of this backgrounded by an ongoing opioid crisis and increasingly destructive omens of climate change.
In short, we’re living through an age of trauma, and it’s taking its toll. Click here to read the entire article by S.I. Rosenbaum.
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