For the main part, Australia has fared well in terms of managing COVID-19, but the recent flareups in Melbourne highlight the gravest fears for violence within homes amid those 3,000 who will be locked down, effectively under police guard, for five full days. It’s easy for someone to say, it’s not like any concentration camp, but comparing contexts nearly a century apart is hardly helpful.
For starters, many of the mental health ills we face today are an echo of the trauma faced in those earlier and later 20th century times. Think about it. Those who were traumatised in Vietnam, the Second World War and the First World War brought back trauma that would go on to affect 30 innocent lives per traumatised life on average (Source: Dr. Bessel van der Kolk cites this statistic in this talk on trauma).
War traumatises people. Trauma begets trauma, and these days, everywhere you go, there are traumatised individuals (or individuals brought up by the traumatised) — sons, grandsons and great grandsons, daughters, granddaughters and great granddaughters — who are either potential powder kegs needing only pressurisation to completely come undone or deer in headlights primed to freeze or flight. Trauma is not the traumatised person’s fault. But unremitted trauma does have the spin-off affect into others’ lives. And so few people who are genuinely traumatised become authentically recovered. It should make us so much more compassionate toward all humanity for the unspeakable atrocities that any of us may have experienced that might explain the trauma and the mental ill-health.
We live in a time where there is very much more trauma carried about in people’s bodies than we care to understand or recognise. It has a massive impact on mental health. And the traumatised bleed their trauma over those who are about to be traumatised. We are living in a time where much trauma is occurring right now. It’s happening in the homes that are locked down. It’s happening in communities everywhere, and one of its most poignant evidences is the visibility of aggression in conflict which is occurring everywhere in much more complicated scenarios than usual — it is wartime after all. The presence of cataclysmically unsafe environments where these are played out akin to Hunger Games level violence provides fodder for trauma to re-double for trauma. Small people and young people, men and women, alike, are at risk, of being harmed and of causing harm. This is both the cause and effect of serious, long-lasting and interminable mental health concerns.
These mental health concerns are not making the front pages because there is more acutely immediate and controversial news to report; the world is gasping right now with such unbelievable news every day. What might compete with COVID-19, news wise, is just as sensational and anxiety invoking. But the silent assassin of COVID-19 is the abysmal mental health of many, many people who are not getting, or reaching out for, the support they need. Many within families are suffering silently, because there is far more noise about the coronavirus at present, and because there is so much suffering, and so many people are in the same boat. This may seem like very depressing news, but we must face what is coming from what is here already, even if what is here already is not being widely reported. We must not be surprised when we hear of horrors. This is wartime, and it should not come as any surprise that few prisoners will have been taken. So many will be affected and are now being affected. We must also take stock of how these traumas make us feel, and how even reading about it can be traumatic.
Those who are under imminent attack, who survive on a wing and a prayer, who don’t know how safe they will be in five minutes let alone tomorrow, need our prayers and our preparedness. They need our awareness, and they need our empathy. There are the poor in many regions of the world who are not only going without food, shelter and clothing, but they are crammed without any masks or other protections against the coronavirus in place. The majority of these are numbered among the most vulnerable. And they are dying at astounding rates. Family members and others who watch on, as in wartime, are witnessing the trauma unfold in real time. It may not be that dissimilar to atrocities like the Rwandan genocides, because all people deserve the protections that many Westerners take for granted.
As a church we wonder what our mission is right now, and there are so many Christians trying to press into what God might be convicting them in their hearts to do. If ever there was a cause for social justice, it is right now; where children, women, and men are under immense attack, and where the least of these are rising to the surface of need, if only we could notice them. Their screams may be silent, but they are also deafening.
Sometimes we seem so far away from the real harm, but the mental ill-health deluge is happening before our eyes, in every place on earth. And then there are our own lives. How many of us if we were truthful can say we have come through this unscathed? Almost no one can, because we are still so far from the end of it. We would hardly want to contemplate a massive natural disaster like a huge tsunami, inferno, flood or hurricane occurring right now, but the odds are just the same as at any time in history. Added to the hundreds of thousands who are ill or who have died, there could easily be the same number through a sizeable natural disaster if it should strike right now. And yet, in Australia at least, the January/February 2020 fires — enormous in scale of loss — are not that far back from memory!
The flow on effect of all of this, of the chronic descent of the world right now, is inevitably the catastrophic effects on mental health to every corner of the world. We are living in such times of emergency that we must be diligent to pray and to seek to do all we can to assist and take care of ourselves and our loved ones.
What can be done Christian soldier, but to face the fact that we were born for times as these. To pray. To act if and when we can. To give refuge. To give drinks of water, listening ears, mouthfuls of food, a coat for backs, smiles of kindness, and any other good deed that might make a shred of difference.
It’s times like these, times where we may read, “break glass in times of war,” that we may emerge. And if we are battling with our mental health, it is incumbent on us to get the support we need, to recover as quickly as we can, because there is a fight for the Kingdom at hand.
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.
Photo by Étienne Godiard on Unsplash
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