My wife worked in ICU then COVID ICU. She still gets PTSD flashbacks from everything she dealt with when someone comes in with similar symptoms. I got front row tickets to seeing a person who's entire job is to keep people alive go from "oh someone I had today coded and we couldn't bring them back" every so often to "we had multiple people die today. A few more aren't much longer. If we put them on their back, they'll die. If we give them water, they'll choke and die. They still refuse to believe that COVID is real as they are actively suffering and dying of it".

Yeah, we get a touch testy when people say it was fake or overblown

It bothers me to this day that people thought it was a hoax. A lot of people I knew who thought it was a hoax wound up catching Covid, though none of them were hospitalized over it, which honestly kinda sucks because it means they didn't learn their lesson.

I was routinely being sent to places like Texas to work during the pandemic because they didn't care. It made me so mad being down there and getting made fun of for wearing a mask when where I live, you couldn't go into any building without one.

I worked at a nursing home at that time. So many people died or were impacted, an entire wing got shut down because of how many patients were lost. It then re-opened to be exclusively for Covid patients.

My grandma died there. I was the last relative to see her alive. The day before she passed, I called all of my aunts/uncles, siblings, and some of my cousins (the ones closest to her) so they could say their goodbyes. As anyone who’s worked with dying patients knows, sometimes people cling on and suffer in a terminal state until they get closure from a relative giving them “permission” to let go. I had to be that person. I told her that it’s okay, that we all love her and we understand. Although she appeared catatonic, right after I said that, a tear rolled down her eye. I think she heard me and understood, though there’s no way to really know. It was a hard day. She passed the next morning.

Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of "I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us," and for a moment I thought "honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed" because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout "quarantine" insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn't lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I'd made it through pretty alright.

Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was "fake" when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn't do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking "you idiots will change your tune when it's your grandmother dying" and then they just didn't... Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.

The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don't think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says "We're not gonna make it are we? People, I mean."

Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we'd need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we'll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.

I didn't feel this way before covid. I used to believe we'd eventually figure things out. Not anymore.

A mental health therapist can and should be able to help a client manage their righteous anger as they work their way through it together. Anger underlies a great many things, and grief is one of them. You don't just say, "I don't want to feel angry," or just decide, "I'm not going to be angry about this anymore," when the rage is this broad and deep and well-established: in time, that kind of denial and repression is just going to explode in your face, if it works at all.

Instead, because anger is very well understood, there are known ways to deal with it. Anger doesn't just disappear on its own, nor even very quickly, and a person suffering this kind of grief could use some assistance diving into the anger and the very exact specifics that are causing it. The therapist should be able to navigate this presenting anger with relative ease and guide the client through it, not just with skillful therapeutic inquiries to get to the very specific root of this writer's unique grief which is where they'd start, but also with coping skills to give the client to be able to self-manage their righteous rage for as long as it takes them to work through it and clear it so that their overwhelming grief can resolve.

This therapist is doing none of that. Instead, they are just offering commentary on the presence and length of the anger as though they're watching a movie, when they could and should be helping the writer sort it out and work through it. That's not on the writer, that's on the therapist.

i think a therapist should be able to help their patient with feels that are the correct reactions to a situation, without resulting to a "why aren't you over this already?"

i bet this specific form of anger also makes the patient feel incredibly hopeless, so their mind has a choice - to feel anger, or despair, they chose anger, and it needs to be worked through in a healthy way, not just gotten over with

Exactly. Whether or not you feel justified in your anger and grief, it is maladaptive to hold onto them if it is preventing you from living your life. You can move past awful things, but you have to actually recognize the issue and want to change.

Dude I'm older than you, so I remember all that, as well as Iran-Contra, AIDS, Watergate (the last scandal for which there were consequences), Vietnam, My Lai, Nixon, the Arab Oil Embargo, the insane inflation of the 70s, Kent State, a whole bunch of assassinations, the Iran Hostage Situation, and a lot more.

Imagine over 60 years of seeing your government do all sorts of stupid things, with virtually no consequences at all (except Watergate, a little bit).

but, you see, those basic precautions require having empathy and caring about other people.. and, sadly, the idea of America Exceptionalistic Individualism, has destroyed empathy and the ability to care for anyone outside of yourself in a disgustingly large swathe of the population.

Which is why they mock, deride, and laugh.. until it affects them, then, and ONLY then, must there be decorum and understanding.

"iT wAs JuSt PnEuMoNiA!"

... pneumonia caused by... a respiratory infection called... COVID-19!

they’re all like, “calm down; you’re overreacting”. I’m like, “no, fuck you; you’re underreacting! People DIED.”

Worst part is the response I've gotten from this. "It was just some old people and those that would have died anyway from something else."

Has anyone else over the age of 35 notice a major shift the past couple of decades regarding how little people care about literally anything?

Until it impacts them personally, yes. Knew someone who thought covid was a common cold (had relatives with mild symptoms of any), then they caught it and it rocked them. Suddenly it wasn't anything to make fun of anymore. If they didn't have bad symptoms, they still wouldn't care.

It’s as if people forgot how to communicate with each other outside of the internet… Is it just me?

Definitely not just you.

I mean it's like certainly going to happen again, in a few years -- it insane they didn't triple whatever budget the CDC had in my opinion but yeah these people would rather die than see their favorite party lose an election. Look up Dying of Whiteness, it's literally all a big death cult.

Nah, this is bs.

Plenty of people are fueled by anger, motivated by anger, focus better when they're angry. Anger can already be cold and calculated, no transformation necessary.

But aside from all that, emotions don't have to be productive. They aren't productive or unproductive, they simply are. Emotions are largely involuntary reactions to our surroundings and circumstances, a lense that colors an individual's world. They're all valid, regardless of whether or not they're productive, and pointing out that "anger is not productive" makes you part of the problem the post is describing.

Something like radical acceptance from dbt is my go to for someone with your argument. I can acknowledge injustice and also acknowledge that much of it is out of my control. I can work towards correcting injustice whenever possible but I also have to recognize that fixing everything is far beyond me. For my own mental health I need to be able to recognize when I am ruminating on an issue that cannot be fixed and learn to let go of that attachment to suffering

Alternatively I can be miserable, forever dwelling on injustices that I cannot fix myself. But how does that help change anything? Really would argue it’s just giving the fascist party what they want. If “the resistance” is beaten and broken simply by business as usual then is that not great for them?

In a non political context think of an emergency veterinarian or ER doctor who got into the field because they truly care for animals/people. They undoubtedly will deal with unfair death, seeing the results of abuse, systemic failures about cost of care resulting in premature death or disability, etc. probably on a near daily basis if they live anywhere with people. Should they simply resign themselves to misery because of this cruel and harsh reality? Or should they find a way to let go of the attachments to the misery involved in these tasks so they can do their (very necessary) job that already desperately needs more of people like them