The pandemic took away my hope. How do I get it back?

“My girlfriends have all quit.” Angela’s voice on the phone breaks as she speaks of the toll the pandemic has taken on her and her nursing colleagues. “I’m the last one standing.”

At 58, with more than 40 years’ experience as an Emergency Department nurse under her scrubs, she’s worked in nearly every state and seen more than most do in a lifetime. But even with an arguably unmatched baseline level of resilience, the pandemic took a heavy toll on her sense of hope. “We did it tough and it has burnt me a bit,” she says.

The pandemic took away hope for a lot of people. How can they get it back?Credit:Aresna Villanueva

There’s little doubt that healthcare workers bore the brunt of the pandemic’s assault on our mental health, but the impact it’s had on our hope for the future isn’t limited to those on the frontlines. From the rise of ‘quiet quitting’ to ‘the great resignation’, we’re on the precipice of a vast shift in our collective psyche and, if unchecked, it could leave our sense of hope in tatters.

As a freelancer, my work was certainly affected by COVID-19 lockdowns. And while my industries have whirred back to life, my optimism has not. I now falter over story pitches I once sent off with confidence, submitting them with a sigh: they won’t run with that. It’s an ineffable sense of defeat that I didn’t carry in the ‘before times’ – an unwelcome passenger refusing to get out of my ride-share.

With every plan tentative, it’s little wonder we’ve been left with an emotional hangover, but just how widespread is this mental shift in the wrong direction?

A 2020 survey of 3575 young people run by Headspace found that 74 per cent reported a drop in their mental health since the onset of COVID-19. Half of the respondents reported that the pandemic was having a high impact on their confidence in their ability to achieve future goals.

Valerie Ling, a clinical psychologist specialising in burnout and workplace wellbeing, confirms that “young people have been found to have had a particularly challenging time maintaining optimism in great uncertainty”. The effects are only just becoming apparent.

The Australian COVID-19 Frontline Healthcare Workers Study brought some startling findings to light. Referring to her research, Professor Karen Willis, who co-led the study, said that “mental health symptoms generally were more likely to be experienced by younger people”. But the damage to frontline workers’ mental health didn’t have an age limit. Willis notes “enormous levels of burnout” across all age groups, with 71 per cent of respondents reporting it.

As we return to some semblance of normal life, for those of us who are most at risk the lingering effects of the pandemic are still keenly felt.

So is there hope for our hope? Willis thinks so. While the takeaways from her research are admittedly “more negative than positive”, the survey also highlights something quite hopeful about our ability to move forward through collective trauma.

Professor Karen Willis has spoken to The Age about hope in a post-pandemic world.Credit:Penny Stephens

“Healthcare workers, including nurses, scored extremely highly on resilience in our survey,” she says. “It tells us that given the right conditions, they have the capacity to bounce back.”

This resilience is something Ward has noticed in frontline workers from comparably harder-hit countries. Speaking to nurses across Britain and the United States, she says, “they were so positive about the future”.

While a lot of us are still grappling with what the pandemic has done to our personal outlook, Carly Dober, director of the Australian Association of Psychologists, points out that for many people it worked as a reset, a kind of “forced slowdown”.

“I think people are trying to maintain elements of that. Some are moving regional or rural, others have stayed working from home. Their wellbeing and physical health have improved because they can do things like walking the dog before work,” she says.

Dober thinks we can use the lessons the pandemic has taught us to learn a proactive approach in our personal mental healthcare. “Jump on it quickly before it starts to get really hairy,” she says. “Early intervention is always better.”

Psychologist Sarah Cox at online mental health provider Lysn has seen countless examples of “post-traumatic growth” in the years since the pandemic first rocked our sense of safety from its perch. She encourages us all to go easy on ourselves while our hope is taking its time recovering.

“It’s natural for our confidence to take a short-term hit while we’re out of our comfort zones and adapting to change,” she says.

Adjunct Professor Kylie Ward, CEO of the Australian College of Nursing (ACN), is in awe of what she saw her profession endure.

“We went to war with an enemy we couldn’t see,” she says. “Years ago, when countries went to war, it was men who went off and fought to protect us. This time the army were predominantly women – nurses, teachers, childcare workers.”

Ward is now focused on future-proofing her industry and points to a more hopeful vision of what health care can be. “Bureaucracy got out of the way, and people just needed to deliver care,” she says. “If we can do it then, why can’t we do that all the time to deliver good care?”

For a lucky lot of us, the pandemic was the first time our blind trust that things generally work out for the better was wholly upended, to reveal a veiled truth – that our existence is at once precarious and deeply precious. And we can choose to take it as a wake-up call, to find what truly lights us up.

“We can be pushed to reflect on important existential questions, and experience a strengthened sense of resilience and connection to purpose, values and community,” says Cox. “But we need to be willing to sit with the discomfort of grief and loss and allow ourselves to be vulnerable and honest with ourselves.”

We’ve now seen the full power of our human spirit as it comes together in crisis and beyond. We’ve seen what we can do when we funnel all our resources into collective good.

In my conversations with nurses about what they’ve been through, and continue to withstand, I kept hearing the ghost of their hope ringing faintly through their words.

And, if they can find their hope again after what they’ve endured, then maybe I’m not ready to call ‘time of death’ on mine.

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