CNN
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As more communities reel from deadly mass shootings — including Dadeville, Alabama, where four people were killed and 28 injured at a Sweet 16 birthday party over the weekend — the trauma of gun violence in the United States is proven to have a collective impact on the mental health of the nation.
Research published this year suggests that the negative effects mass shootings can have on mental health may extend beyond the survivors and community directly affected to a much wider population.
In the days after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May, a mental health hotline received a spike in messages referring to guns and other related terms. firearms, according to a study funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . Although the study did not track the precise location of incoming messages, Crisis Text Line – a non-profit organization offering free, confidential crisis intervention – serves people nationwide.
Mass shootings have reached a record pace in the United States, with at least 162 already reported in 2023. It’s been a week since the deadly mass shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and there have been more a dozen since, according to the Gun Violence Archives.
The devastating frequency means that more and more people are directly affected and the general public is regularly exposed to indirect impacts.
“We know that exposure through media – which can occur in many different outlets, from the swipe of your finger or the sound of your phone – to some type of traumatic event can lead to an acute stress reaction in a person and trigger an underlying post-traumatic stress they may be having from something else,” said Leah Brogan, a psychologist who works at both the Center for Violence Prevention and the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“So certainly that constant exposure can aggravate and activate people even when they’re not feeling something directly.”
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that gun violence more broadly has affected most families in the United States in some way. Nearly one in five adults has seen a family member killed by a gun, including in homicide and suicide, and about 1 in 6 has witnessed a gunshot wound.
Brogan works as a trauma therapist for young people who land in the emergency department after a violence-related injury. Often, she says, beneath the incident that landed them in the hospital lurks a history of trauma that has evoked negative emotions related to loss of control, loss of predictability and helplessness.
“Many return to communities where gun violence is, unfortunately, a reality. And that reality can be quite triggering,” she said. “And so a lot of work is being done to validate that reality for them and also trying to identify where they may have some degree of control in their own lives.”
As mass shootings and gun-related deaths reach record levels in the United States, underlying trauma may be building up in the general population that could create those same feelings of helplessness at the national.
After the Uvalde school shooting, the study found that grief became a focal point for a much larger share of gun-related conversations coming to the Crisis Text Line.
“People are reaching out so that they can establish a sense of stability and calm in their own lives,” said Dr Shairi Turner, an internist and pediatrician who is also Crisis Text Line’s health director.
Whether they are members of the affected community or simply aware of a tragedy that has unfolded across the country, immediate connection helps people find connection and deal with all their emotions, he said. she stated.
According to the study authors, public health interventions that specifically target feelings of grief can help reduce acute mental health crises that occur immediately after mass shootings.
Crisis Text Line primarily serves children and young adults, and the vast majority of messages the mental health helpline receives are from people under the age of 25.
The CDC and others have drawn attention to the nation’s youth mental health crisis, and experts say this group is particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of a mass shooting.
“At under 20 or 22, our brains are still developing and we’re still formulating our understanding of the world,” Turner said. “Children and young adults are beginning to create narratives around their own safety, the safety of their schools, homes and communities based on what they witness. Tragedies can tend to make them think the world is a dangerous place.
But adolescent brains are also highly malleable, and children are remarkably resilient, Brogan said.
“What I always emphasize is that bad things can happen to us, but they don’t need to define us,” she said. “It comes down to understanding that there are things out of our control, and we really spin our wheels when we try to control them. What we control is how we respond to them.
Seeking help by contacting a crisis hotline is one way to do this.
“It can take days, weeks or months to process a tragedy,” Turner said. “Reach out for support, listen to each other’s feelings, and set limits on the depth of the current crisis.”