Dear colleagues,
This column is going to cover some triggering topics. Please be advised.
As I’ve watched the brief but intense war on our sensibilities, morality, and sense of stability, I am increasingly concerned about the person-level effect these changes and decisions can create. What I learned in my year in federal government and public service is that the people who work in these agencies of the U.S. government are deeply committed and mission driven. Being summarily dismissed, denigrated, and divided is both dehumanizing and taking place in a radical and disorienting manner. The effect is traumatizing.
Kimryn Rathmell discusses this column on The Cancer Letter Podcast.
Let me tell you a part of my life story that I don’t often share.
My father was my idol. 6’7” and built big.
Strong is a word a lot of people would use to describe him. He could lift, carry, or muscle anything. Raised in a Pentecostal home, his faith was incredibly strong and unwavering, even as he later converted to Catholicism to join my mother’s faith. His homelife had been hard—his parents were tenant farmers, poor and stern—and he developed an inner strength that matched his profound introversion.
Being summarily dismissed, denigrated, and divided is both dehumanizing and taking place in a radical and disorienting manner. The effect is traumatizing.
He was an earth science teacher turned school superintendent. A civic leader in our community. A beekeeper and an avid hunter and fisherman, he craved solitude when he wasn’t carrying out his official duties in work, church, or community.
He and my mom had moved to be near us as I finished my fellowship, taking on a larger, complex public school district, and things were going incredibly well. After the first three years, he was given a five-year contract. They were settling into the community. Then things changed suddenly. The way he got crosswise at work doesn’t matter, but over a few weeks I saw him lose his sense of security, then his sense of safety, then his identity.
I knew things were bad, and I asked him to talk to his doctor or to get counseling. He insisted that his priest was what he needed. He was certain that seeing a mental health specialist would end his career.
I had a friend of his come over and take away his rifles. I saw him take away three. I didn’t know there were four.
The last night I saw him, Maundy Thursday, after a tense and public effort to clear his name, and our final exchange should have let me know—I said I was starting a new job in a new state, and they could just come and live with me. He responded that he knew I would always take care of my mother.
The next day, Good Friday, he went missing. Took the car, but not his wallet.
We found his body on Easter Sunday. In a field 20 miles away. An open prayerbook on the seat of his car.
My family has had to process and deal with this trauma over the past 22 years. My mother never recovered, and I think of him every day.
In a career devoted to saving life, we know there are scenarios where we have no chance to win, but our goal is to protect and preserve life at almost all costs. This was not an inevitable death.
I wish every day that he had felt more support from friends and family for the anguish and despair he was feeling.
I wish the invulnerability he always showed as a strong, silent man had been balanced by an ability to be vulnerable. To be able to ask for help, to know how to let others lift.
I wish the stigma of needing and receiving mental health services was not there.
I share this part of my past because I am seeing some of the same stress, burden, and anguish in my fellow scientists, physicians, organizational leaders, and staff. Our identities are tightly interwoven in our work, particularly when it carries such a deep mission. The callousness and speed with which the level of respect and honor for what we do is being swept aside is heartbreaking.
I know there are people in our communities who are experiencing the same loss of security, safety, and identity.
- We need to be prepared, and be aware.
- We need to offer support for our colleagues who are suffering.
- We need to take away the stigma of seeking professional help.
- We need to proactively develop strategies to enable people to navigate these issues today, and when the trauma resurfaces next year, or is reignited in five years.
What we all are going through is like a disaster, and we prepare for and drill for disasters. And we recognize the trauma of the event in the immediate aftermath and beyond.
How can we mobilize our expertise to be ready and to engage our colleagues as we collectively experience something like we have never before? We need to recognize that we are all experiencing this differently, our traumas are unique, and the timing and scale is unpredictable. But, we can start by being aware, by being supportive, by erasing stigma, and by seeking proactively to enlist help in ways that can help a community that is going through a mass event. Finally, we can recognize that unfortunately, we do have colleagues who have been in this type of experience before, and we can lean on them for insight and guidance.
If you need immediate help, dial 988. And know many employers, and every agency of the federal government, have strong employee assistance programs who are skilled, confidential, and helpful.
We know if we save one life, we save a family, we sustain a community. The effort and preparation are worth it.
