When helping hurts

It’s time to start helping the helpers

There’s a quote from Fred Rogers that resurfaces in every crisis. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Mr. Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

In 2021, PBS re-upped the quote in a short video introducing their effort to laud the Covid helpers.

That same year, 334,000 health care providers, including 117,000 physicians, left the workforce in the United States. To put that in context, it takes US medical schools over four years to graduate that many doctors.

And they all left in a single year.

It’s not just doctors, either. Over the first two-and-a-half years of the Covid pandemic, 300,000 nurses also left the profession. Those that didn’t have continued to go on strike.

Plenty has been written about the preposterous levels of burnout the medical community faced during the pandemic. One in five health care professionals met clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder within just the first year of Covid. Anxiety and depression—in addition to that PTSD—only increased in providers as the pandemic wore on.

And then there were the death threats we all faced for doing our jobs during a crisis none of us signed up for.

I have a whole folder of those death threats! Like this one in response to one of my pandemic-era tweets: