February 2020

As news of the ‘coronavirus’ spreads as virulently as the illness itself around the globe, it has struck a chord of ‘panic’ into most people being effected by this rapid outbreak. As the news that the first confirmed cases in the U.S. have now hit our shores, it has sent ripples of fear and panic into the streets and minds of most New Yorkers and Americans, who join those in China, Europe and Asia who have been struck by this critical illness.

A number of reveries immediately come to my mind about these events – the first is one which lies dormantly in the recesses of my mind, and subconscious, and one which has a very long memory, as most traumatic ones have a very long memory. It is the recollecting of the events surrounding ‘9/11’ in New York City on Sept 11, 2001. I am placed back in mind of it through a conversation with one of my Chinese patients living in Mainland China. As we know, most of the over 80,000 confirmed cases and the thousands of confirmed deaths due to ‘coronavirus’ have come from mainland China, understandably sending tremors of panic and paralysis throughout China. She is a professor at a university there, and while in-person classes and the universities have been shut down for over one month now, there are still on-line discussion groups amongst the faculty and students of these schools, to allay fears and anxieties and to keep connections flowing amongst the university students. One of the thing we speak about is the ‘upside to the virus’ as she puts it. She states, “We came to realize that, while this virus is deadly and frightening, and paralyzing to most of us, that in our discussions, what emerged was a conversation about the ‘upside’ to this phenomena – that is, our continued connections to one another, through online discussions, and more palpably, our ‘common thread’ of all being in ‘this thing’ together. This is what places me in mind of what many of us experienced in NYC in the aftermath of events around 9/11 – our shared experience, and later what I would refer to as our ‘shared humanity’, New Yorker’s helping fellow New Yorker’s, all bound by our collective traumatic experience of that day. It shifted, while only for a while, our focus, our priorities, and reminded us of our communal ‘humanity’ and caring and regard for one another. I, like many of my fellow clinicians, came together and formed ‘spontaneous legions of volunteer mental health clinicians, who would offer our services to many of the families and colleagues of the thousands of survivors and witnesses that were at ‘Ground Zero’, many of whom lost hundreds of colleagues at the site of the World Trade Centers. We were now bound not to the ‘routine’ of our everyday NY lives, but because of this tragedy and series of traumatic events and their aftermath, were called to return to our collective humanity and cores, as we now shared something new, and unknown, and frightening and devastating, all together. Here we were again,, summoned by a potential ‘crisis’ to sharing this critical space together, seemingly globally, through this virulent illness called ‘coronavirus’.

To say we are living in turbulent and quite uncertain times, in terms of the political landscape, say nothing of the factors effecting our planet, its climate, and thereby the health of all of our planet’s inhabitants, would be an understatement for sure. Our collective relationship to the ‘unknown’ is precarious at best, and the changes effecting out everyday lives are happening at more and more a rapid pace. It is, at moments of ‘crisis’ like these, that we are reminded of what really matters, and how we are placed in mind of the importance of holding onto our ‘humanity’ and collective humanness, and regard for fellow inhabitants around the world, and in our own backyards.