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Introduction: Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project

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Abstract

In this article, we introduce the SSM-MH Special Issue “Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” which presents findings from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). PJP is an online journaling platform and mixed-methods research study created in May 2020 to provide ordinary people around the world an opportunity to chronicle the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their lives—for themselves and for posterity. The essays in this collection demonstrate how journaling via an online platform can help illuminate experiences of mental wellbeing and distress, with important implications for both research and clinical practice. We begin by introducing the Pandemic Journaling Project and describing our procedures for generating the data subsets analyzed in the papers collected here. We then outline the principal interventions of the special issue as a whole, introduce the papers, and identify a number of cross-cutting themes and broader contributions. Finally, we point toward key questions for future research and therapeutic practice by highlighting the three-fold value of online journaling as a research method, a therapeutic strategy, and a tool for advancing social justice. We focus in particular on how this innovative methodological approach holds promise as both a modality for psychotherapeutic intervention and a form of grassroots collaborative ethnography. We suggest that our methods create new opportunities for confronting the impact of pandemics and other large-scale events that generate radical social change and affect population-level mental health.
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Introduction: Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from
the Pandemic Journaling Project
Heather M. Wurtz
a
,
b
,
d
,
*
, Sarah S. Willen
a
,
b
, Katherine A. Mason
c
,
d
a
Anthropology Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
b
Research Program on Global Health &Human Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
c
Anthropology Department, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
d
Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Journaling
COVID-19
Mental health
Medical anthropology
Grassroots collaborative ethnography
Coping
ABSTRACT
In this article, we introduce the SSM-MH Special Issue Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights
from the Pandemic Journaling Project,which presents ndings from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). PJP
is an online journaling platform and mixed-methods research study created in May 2020 to provide ordinary
people around the world an opportunity to chronicle the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their livesfor
themselves and for posterity. The essays in this collection demonstrate how journaling via an online platform can
help illuminate experiences of mental wellbeing and distress, with important implications for both research and
clinical practice. We begin by introducing the Pandemic Journaling Project and describing our procedures for
generating the data subsets analyzed in the papers collected here. We then outline the principal interventions of
the special issue as a whole, introduce the papers, and identify a number of cross-cutting themes and broader
contributions. Finally, we point toward key questions for future research and therapeutic practice by highlighting
the three-fold value of online journaling as a research method, a therapeutic strategy, and a tool for advancing
social justice. We focus in particular on how this innovative methodological approach holds promise as both a
modality for psychotherapeutic intervention and a form of grassroots collaborative ethnography. We suggest that our
methods create new opportunities for confronting the impact of pandemics and other large-scale events that
generate radical social change and affect population-level mental health.
I'm tired. It's been more than two months of being home and I am so tired. I
am trying to balance working from home full-time, being a surrogate
teacher to a high school student and middle school student, and special
education student. I am the hunter/gatherer for all household provisions,
the bill payer, the chef, the best friend to my 13-year-old daughter, the
therapist for my son, and the sounding board for my husband. I am the end-
all-be-all for everyone and I am tapped out.
On June 3, 2020, Susan,a woman in her early 50s from the US state
of Rhode Island, recorded these thoughts in her rst journal entry with
the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a combined online journaling
platform and mixed-methods research study that two of us (SSW &KAM)
created in May 2020, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of
researchers and students. Susan (a pseudonym) goes on to describe the
guilt she feels in not embracing the opportunity created by forced
isolation to spend more time with her family. She continues with a
laundry list of emergent responsibilities that impede any chance of
enjoyable family time. Susan must coordinate remote health services for
her son, who has autism. She spends hours on the internet ordering basic
supplies that cannot be found in her local grocery store. And she nds
herself dusting offher sewing machine to make cloth masks with l-
tersall while maintaining her full-time job and keeping her family fed.
As the weight of pandemic life grows heavier with the passage of time,
she reaches a point of mental exhaustion. I'm just so tired,she writes.
I'm tired of working, Tired of schooling, Tired of this whole coronavirus.
I remember when I thought being a working mom was tough. Now I am a
working everything."
Susan's account sheds light on the two core issues at the heart of this
special issue: the profound and far-reaching mental health impact of
COVID-19, and the role that journaling can play in helping people
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: heather.wurtz@uconn.edu (H.M. Wurtz).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
SSM - Mental Health
journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/ssm-mental-health
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100141
Received 29 March 2022; Received in revised form 10 August 2022; Accepted 11 August 2022
Available online 22 September 2022
2666-5603/©2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
SSM - Mental Health 2 (2022) 100141
confront the challenges that the pandemic has posed to their everyday
wellbeing. The papers in this special issue examine different aspects of
these core issues by analyzing journals created on the PJP online jour-
naling platform. PJP was designed as a way for ordinary people, any-
where in the world, to chronicle their experiences of life during the
COVID-19 pandemic. From the start, we designed PJP as a form of
grassroots collaborative ethnography, which we dene as a research
approach that emphasizes both broad public accessibility and the co-
production of knowledge with our interlocutors.
In the rst phase of PJP (PJP-1), which launched in May 2020 and
continued for two full years until May 2022, anyone with access to a
smartphone or computer could participate, including teens aged 1517
with permission of a parent or guardian. After signing up and completing
a baseline survey, participants were presented with the opportunity to
create two journal entries, following suggested narrative prompts.
1
Each
week, they then received a weekly email or text message inviting them to
create a new set of weekly journal entries. Responses could be submitted
in any combination of written, audio, or photo formats. Between 2020
and 2022, over 1800 people in 55 countries contributed nearly 27,000
journal entries on the PJP platform. PJP is now initiating its second phase
(PJP-2) which takes a longitudinal approach to charting the long-term
impact of the pandemic. The PJP team also is conducting a number of
targeted research studies using an adapted form of the PJP platform.
The papers in this special issue make use of PJP-1 journal entries to
explore the near-term mental health impact of the pandemic on diverse
groups and in various domains. A growing body of research has begun to
demonstrate that the mental health impact of COVID-19 is wide-ranging,
profound, and also variable. Clinically, pandemic-related distress is
manifesting in a wide range of symptoms, including higher rates of
anxiety, depression, and sleeping difculties (Nagata et al., 2022; Ste-
phenson, 2021; Vahratian, Blumberg, Terlizzi, &Schiller, 2021). As in
earlier historical moments of collective crisis and disruption, these con-
sequences affect not only people with prior histories of mental health
concerns, but also those without. The pandemic has affected individuals
across a range of social positions, life stages, and competing obligations.
Some groups, however, have been especially affected, including adoles-
cents and young people (Campione-Barr et al., 2021;A.K.Cohen and
Cromwell, 2021;Racine et al., 2021;van der Laan et al., 2021), students
(Gazmararian et al., 2021;Rudenstine et al., 2021;Wieczorek et al.,
2021;Xu, 2021), people with family caregiving responsibilities (Beach
et al., 2021;S.A.Cohen et al., 2021;Russell et al., 2020), people expe-
riencing pregnancy and/or new parenthood (Hanetz-Gamliel et al., 2021;
Shafer et al., 2020;Suzuki, 2020)); and people in professional caregiving
roles, including health care providers among others (Abdalla et al., 2021;
Freidus et al., 2021;Galbraith et al., 2021;Marvaldi et al., 2021).
For many groups, structural and intersectional forms of vulnerability
exacerbate physical and mental health risk (Prohaska, 2020;Vickery,
2018). This includes people of color (Hawke et al., 2021;Kormendi and
Brown, 2021;Mladenov and Brennan, 2021), people with disabilities
(Breaux et al., 2021;Petzold et al., 2020;Wagner et al., 2022), members of
LGBTQIAþcommunities (Dominey-Howes et al., 2014;Ramirez et al.,
2018), and people living in poverty (Drescher et al., 2014;Patel et al.,
2020). While evidence of resilience is emerging in certain groups (Breaux
et al., 2021;Killgore et al., 2020;Kumar et al., 2021;Petzold et al., 2020;
Scheffers et al., 2021), the long-term mental health impact of the pandemic
is likely to reverberate for years, if not decades, to come. Indeed, evidence
from earlier periods of population-level crisis and disruption suggests that
for some (Hong et al., 2009;Mohammed et al., 2015;Reardon, 2015),
especially some younger people (Aronson et al., 2015;Dyb et al., 2011;
Schoon and Mortimer, 2017;Sprang and Silman, 2013), the mental health
impact of the pandemic may persist over the life course.
Robust evidence has shown that journaling can be an important tool
for improving emotional and psychological wellbeing (Bandini et al.,
2021;Choi et al., 2018;Dwyer et al., 2013;Emmons and McCullough,
2003;Kini et al., 2016;Pennebaker, 1997;Pennebaker and Chung, 2011;
Redwine et al., 2016). For instance, it can serve as a vehicle for inner
dialogue that connects thoughts, feelings, and actions(Hubbs and
Brand, 2005: 62), thereby providing a creative way to process difcult
life events and increase self-awareness and self-understanding. In this
collection, we expand and innovate on this literature by examining the
promise of journaling as a front-line tool for confronting mental health
distress, including forms of distress that may not readily be addressed
through other therapeutic strategies. Journaling may be a particularly
powerful intervention when access to conventional therapeutic services
is constrained including, for instance, in times of crisis and in
resource-limited settings. Findings from this collection also point to the
potential benets of journaling as a way of both framing conversations
about shared experiences and promoting social connectivity, especially
in conjunction with other strategies and approaches like structured dia-
logue and opportunities for public engagement.
In this introduction, we begin by describing PJP, the data archive it
has generated, and our procedures for generating the data subsets
analyzed in the papers collected here. We then outline the principal in-
terventions of the special issue as a whole, followed by summaries of each
paper and a discussion of cross-cutting themes. Finally, we point to
several key questions that PJP raises for future research in mental health
elds and beyond, including questions about the three-fold potential of
online journaling as a research method, a therapeutic strategy, and a tool
for advancing social justice, for instance through archival activism
(Carney, 2021;Flinn, 2011;Zhang et al., 2020). We focus in particular on
how this innovative methodological approach holds promise as both a
modality for psychotherapeutic intervention and a form of grassroots
collaborative ethnography that can create new opportunities for con-
fronting the impact of pandemics and other large-scale events that
generate radical social change and affect population-level mental health.
1. Methods
The unique data set created in PJP-1 offers an unprecedented op-
portunity to gain immediate insight into the unfolding mental health
impact of the pandemic using a mixed-methods lens, and in rich rst-
person detail. Participants were introduced to the project in a variety
of ways, including via social and professional networks, public pre-
sentations, social media accounts, and popular media coverage of the
project. The PJP-1 interface ran fully in both English and Spanish, and
participants could submit their journal entries in any language they
chose. Participants could create entries using writing, audio, and/or
images, and no limitations were placed on the content they created. Text
entries ranged in length from a single sentence to many pages of text,
with or without an accompanying audio or image le. Participants
completed a baseline quantitative survey when they rst joined that
employed validated as well as original survey items addressing de-
mographics (e.g., age, gender, income, country of residence, etc.),
COVID-19 exposure, self-reported physical and mental health status, and
loneliness/social isolation, among other topics (see Appendix A). Several
sets of questions, including bi-weekly physical and mental health ques-
tions, were then repeated periodically, yielding quantitative measures of
change over time that can be analyzed in conjunction with participants
qualitative entries.
Participants received invitations to contribute each week via their
choice of email or text message. Each weekly link delivered two oppor-
tunities to create qualitative journal entries. The rst, recurring prompt
asked in broad terms how the pandemic had affected journalers in the
past week. For the second entry, journalers were offered a choice of two
prompts, typically one with an external focus (e.g., level of trust in
government, key sources of scientic information, or the economic
impact of COVID-19) and another focusing on subjective experience (e.g.,
1
The baseline survey (see Appendix A) was created in collaboration with
Abigail Fisher Williamson, political scientist and PJP research consultant, to
whom we owe a particular debt of gratitude.
H.M. Wurtz et al. SSM - Mental Health 2 (2022) 100141
2
the impact of the pandemic on close relationships, sense of social
connectedness, or mental health). PJP-1 employed a cohort design such
that all participants received the same questions in the same order,
regardless of when they joined (i.e., Week #1 questions followed by
Week #2, etc.). Participants could access and download their entire
journals at any time, and with each entry they had the option of granting
permission for their anonymized responses to be shared on PJP's
Featured Entries webpage.
2
After two years, weekly journaling came to a
close in May 2022. The full PJP-1 dataset has been cleaned to remove all
identifying contact information and deposited in the Qualitative Data
Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University, where it carries a unique DOI
(Willen and Mason, 2022). Twenty-ve years following the deposit, the
dataset will be released as a publicly accessible historical archive.
3
Overall, 1839 individuals joined the project between May 2020 and
May 2022, including 1692 participants who used the English-language
platform (92%) and 147 who used the Spanish platform (8%). The
platform was particularly embraced by women and the young: of the total
sample, nearly 80% (1460) identied as female(n ¼1460), and almost
half were between 15 and 29 years old (n ¼875). PJP was designed to
privilege participant accessibility over the creation of a representative
sample. Nonetheless, this large trove of material captures a signicant
degree of internal diversity and highlights noteworthy patterns that we
begin to explore in the papers collected here (see also Willen et al., 2020).
The demographic features of the overall sample are shown in Table 1.
Each paper in this collection analyzes a subset of PJP-1 data, focusing
on a specic mental health dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic. We
invited contributors to request datasets based on specic quantitative
and/or qualitative parameters of the overall PJP-1 archive. Contributors
could request a dataset dened by demographic criteria (or other
quantitative survey responses, such as bi-weekly mental, physical and
emotional health questions); qualitative responses to specic journaling
prompts; and/or designated keywords. Contributors specied their
preference of English and/or Spanish language data. When selection
criteria generated a data subset of more than 100 participants, a random
sample of journals from 100 participants who met the designated criteria
was provided. Only text-based journals (no audio or images) were
requested and included in the analyses presented here.
Most papers in the collection focus on the full journals created by a
subset of participants between May 2020 and July 2021. Since partici-
pants joined PJP-1 at different points in time, and since participation
each week was optional and many journalers skipped weeks, the length
of participant journals varies widely. Some journals cover a limited
number of weeks, while others present a continuous narrative over time.
PJP received ethics approval from the Institutional Review Board at
the University of Connecticut (Protocol #H20-0065), and all contributors
were included on the IRB protocol prior to working with the data. Several
contributors presented earlier versions of their papers as part of the
roundtable, On Journaling in COVID Times: A Roundtable on the
Ethical, Methodological, and Theoretical Implications of the Pandemic
Journaling Project,at the 2021 Biennial Meeting of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology.
2. The Papers
2.1. Facing crisis and disruption
Each essay in the collection explores a different emotional or psy-
chological dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rst four papers
focus on specic groups facing elevated risk: new mothers (Larotonda
and Mason, 2022), Black women caregivers (Kalinowski et al., 2022),
healthcare workers (Ansari, 2022), and college students in New York City
(Baines, 2022). The nal three take a thematic focus, tackling topics of
agency (Parson et al., 2022), loneliness (Parsons, 2022), and languish-
ing(Willen, 2022).
Larotonda and Mason's essay (New Life, New Feelings of Loss:
Journaling New Motherhood During COVID-19), focuses on the expe-
riences of PJP participants who were pregnant or gave birth during the
pandemic. The authors examine the considerable emotional distress that
perinatal women experience when they are unable to engage in the
critical relationships and events that they deem necessary for integrating
their babies into their families and completing their transition into
motherhooda process called kinning(Howell, 2003). Drawing upon
the journals of thirty-two mothers and prospective mothers who were
pregnant or gave birth during the rst eighteen months of the pandemic,
Larotonda and Mason foreground the subtle feelings of loss that occur
when practices of care and belonging during the perinatal period are
disrupted or completely derailed. Their ndings have important
Table 1
Demographic characteristics for full PJP-1 sample.
#%
Gender
Female 1460 79%
Male 319 17%
Other 39 2%
Age
1519 428 23%
2029 447 24%
3039 255 14%
4049 207 12%
5059 200 11%
60þ283 16%
Race/Ethnicity
a
Asian/Pacic Islander 111 6%
Black 102 6%
Hispanic/Latinx 151 8%
2 or more listed/Other 170 9%
Not available 398 22%
White 907 49%
Educational attainment
Less than high school 26 1%
High school or equivalent 196 11%
Technical or vocational school 51 3%
Some college 417 23%
Associate or Bachelor's degree 487 27%
Post-graduate degree 643 35%
Household Income (in US$)
Less than $15,000 43 2%
$15,000 - $50,000 311 17%
$50,000 - $99,999 351 19%
$100,000 - $149,999 240 13%
$150,000 - $199,999 104 6%
$200,000 - $249,999 73 4%
$250,000 þ105 6%
Don't know/prefer not to say 461 25%
Total 1839 100%
**The total percentage in each category does not add up to 100% because some
participants left one or more survey questions blank.
a
Given the difculty in translating U.S. racial/ethnic categories for global
audiences, we asked about racial/ethnic background in two different ways.
Participants who listed the U.S. as their country of residence were asked a closed-
ended question based on U.S. census categories. Additionally, all participants,
regardless of country of residence, were offered an opportunity to name the
racial or ethnic group(s) that best describes youin a separate, write-in ques-
tion. Here we report only responses to the closed-ended question.
2
For further reference, see the PJP homepage ((https://pandemic-journalin
g-project.chip.uconn.edu/) and Featured Entries page (https://www.pandemi
cjournalingproject.org/archive/featured).
3
Following a two-year embargo period, researchers will be able to apply for
permission to access and analyze the anonymized PJP-1 ndings via QDR. Re-
quests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
H.M. Wurtz et al. SSM - Mental Health 2 (2022) 100141
3
implications for how perinatal mental health struggles are conceptual-
ized and addressed during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Caregiving also features centrally in the essay by Kalinowski and
colleagues (Shouldering the Load Yet Again: Black Women's Experiences
of Stress during COVID-19), but in a different context. The authors
examine experiences of stress among Black women in the US who re-
ected in their journals on their struggles to navigate increased care-
giving responsibilities, work-related challenges, and disruptions to social
connectedness resulting from the pandemic. The article underscores the
importance of deploying an intersectional lens to understand the cumu-
lative impact of stressors that emerge in overlapping domains of social
experience, such as race and gender. For Black women, the Superwoman
Schema (Woods-Giscomb
e, 2010), or the sense that one must appear
strong and prioritize care for others over one's own personal needs, may
exacerbate mental health distress produced by the pandemic, particularly
for women who carry heavy caregiving responsibilities. Kalinowski and
colleagues highlight two critical questions that require future research.
First, future studies will need to investigate the long-term impact of
COVID-19-related stress on the physical and mental health of Black
women. Second, despite strong evidence regarding the positive mental
health benets of journalingboth in general and in relation to specic
health conditionsthe authors call attention to the paucity of research
on whether these ndings hold true for Black women in particular. The
authors assert that further research is warranted on whether journaling
can help reduce stress and/or mitigate physical and mental health harms
that are consequences of racism for Black women.
Ansari's essay (An Accumulation of Distress: Grief, Loss, and Isola-
tion among Healthcare Providers during the COVID-19 Pandemic) ex-
plores the distinct mental health challenges faced by healthcare
providers (HCP) as they contend with the suffering and death of patients
and their patients' loved ones while also navigating loss and grief in their
own lives. Ansari shows how HCPs' capacity for processing and coping
with grief is often constrained both by stressors within the workplace
(e.g., stafng shortages, uncompensated overtime) and by feelings of
guilt about lamenting social losses (e.g., lost time with loved ones, or
missing out on important life events) that may seem trivial compared to
the losses of life they encounter at work. Ansari illuminates wider themes
that cut across the papers in the collection, including the distress of living
life on hold,as well as the need for recognition and validation of
divergent forms of loss and grief in clinical workspaces. Ansari's ndings
also underscore the importance of carving out spaces for social connec-
tion and shared experience in coping with the isolating conditions of
crisis, a point that is taken up in the next two essays as well.
In It's Normal to Admit You're Not Okay: First Generation College
Students Dening Health and Finding Wellness through the Journaling
Process in New York City,Baines offers a rst-hand perspective on how
classroom-based engagement with PJP served as a therapeutic resource for
multiple cohorts of community college students in New York City, an early
epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Baines describes how she integrated
PJP into her teaching, and how students in her classes found meaning and
value in opportunities for guided reection that were structured around
both PJP prompts and material posted on PJP's publicly accessible
Featured Entries page. She shows how these opportunities helped students
reframe their own experiences of heightened mental distress during
COVID-19, especially by recognizing their experiences as part of a widely-
shared phenomenon rather than a reection of personal inadequacy.
Classroom engagement with PJP helped students recognize not only which
aspects of their experiences of distress and struggle they shared with
others, but also how their own encounters with structural inequity inten-
sied their experiences. Baines concludes by suggesting that journaling
may hold promise not only as a means for collecting narratives about
pandemic life, but also as a powerful source of collective or community-
based therapeutic intervention for marginalized young adultsapopula-
tion that often is overlooked in discussions of unmet mental health needs.
The nal three essays explore different analytic frames for thinking
about the mental health impact of the pandemic. The theme of agency is
the focus of Parson, Wurtz, and colleagues' piece, Life Will Go on with
the Beauty of the Roses: The Moral Dimensions of Coping with Distress
through Autobiographical Writing during COVID-19.Drawing on
scholarship about the therapeutic power of self-narrativization, the essay
illustrates how the deeply uncertain and disruptive nature of the
pandemic can also create new opportunities for self-growth. The authors
focus on an illustrative case study involving a Guatemalan woman named
Crescencia (pseudonym) who, like the students in Baines' essay, nds
ways of coping with the mental health distress of COVID-19 through
processes of both self-reection and social connectivity. In the crucible of
pandemic conditions, Crescencia nds new meaning in her relationships
with herself and others and creates a moral roadmap for navigating the
new normalof life during COVID-19.
Parsons' essay (I Miss my Friends, but I also Miss Strangers:
Pandemic Loneliness and the Importance of Place and Practice) explores
how one common effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, the abrupt and
sustained interruption of weak ties,or informal or random encounters
with strangers and acquaintances, has contributed to a widespread sense
of loneliness. Parsons contends that weak ties have materiality, and that
loneliness is not simply a longing for people, but also for the places and
social practices that draw people together, even in ephemeral ways. By
examining journalers' accounts of missed activities, such as reading at the
library or singing in the church choir, Parsons shows how experiences of
belonging often are generated through non-intimate spheres and re-
lations. Her ndings show how a deeper understanding of loneliness as
lived and managed by ordinary people during COVID-19, including ex-
periences of interrupted weak social ties, can yield new insights into
overlooked aspects of both loneliness and belonging.
In the nal essay (Languishing in Critical Perspective: Roots and
Routes of a Traveling Concept in COVID-19 Times), Willen traces the
social life of a scholarly concept—“languishing”—as it left the academy
and entered the sphere of public discourse following the publication of a
newspaper article that became the most-read New York Times story of
2021(NY Times staff, 2021). Drawing on PJP journalers' engagements
with this term as it began circulating in public discourse, the essay ex-
plores its subjective value for people struggling to name and navigate the
disruptive impact of the pandemic in their lives. Putting languishingin
conversation with other concepts like depression, anxiety, and trauma,
the essay also explores the kinds of denitional slippage and cultural
work that occur when psychological and psychiatric concepts become
detached from their origins and take on new forms of meaning and sig-
nicance as they become vernacularized. Overall, Willen cautions that
languishinglike its countervailing concept in positive psychology,
ourishingmay have strong cultural resonance in the present historical
moment, yet risks distracting us from the urgent work of confronting the
root causes of the profound mental health burden precipitated, and now
exacerbated, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
2.2. Journaling as research method and psychosocial intervention in times
of crisis
Taken together, these essays show how PJP participants' journals
offer a timely and qualitatively rich window onto the mental health
burdens imposed by COVID-19, especially during the rst 18 months of
the pandemic. As the mental health impact of COVID-19 continues to
unfold, this special issue provides unique insight into facets and domains
of mental health that are not easily accessed through more conventional
research approaches. For example, the mental health challenges
described in these essays include feelings of emotional fatigue, boredom,
loneliness, stuckness, disappointment, fear, and existential angstall of
which inuence mental health, but none of which is necessarily diag-
nosable as a particular illness. Such struggles emerge in the broader
context of people's quotidian lives, and they involve a complex interplay
of competing life demands, relational obligations, moral commitments,
and personal aspirations and desires amidst the deep uncertainty and
isolation of pandemic life.
H.M. Wurtz et al. SSM - Mental Health 2 (2022) 100141
4
In Larotonda and Mason's essay on perinatal motherhood, for
instance, we meet a Native American woman in her 30s from Texas who
mourned the absence of her family and friends during early stages of new
motherhood, saying, I have a baby who has never met his relatives
nor has he been baptized The door[s] are shut for us in many ways and
I don't know how long my world can live like this.In her essay on
loneliness, Parsons introduces a nonbinary single white person in their
late 20s in Colorado for whom the loss of public life and social engage-
ment weighed heavily: My social circle has been whittled down to about
4 people. We rarely venture out to a restaurant or bar patio. I miss bars,
dancing, and meeting strangers. I miss experiencing new things. The
monotony of the pandemic is absolutely numbing.
These accounts highlight a central theme that cross-cuts the essays in
the collection: mental distress during COVID-19 has resulted, in large
part, from subtle disruptions to the social fabric of everyday life. Missed
milestones, stolen moments, stalled aspirations, and the absence of
physical touch and other forms of social and communal interaction are
signicant sources of emotional and existential turmoil for journalers
across the lifespan who have lived through, and been forced to adapt to,
these turbulent times.
As the essays in this collection suggest, consequences like these may be
particularly pronounced among populations and communities already
struggling with limited social support, especially those whose life cir-
cumstances are constrained by social, economic, and political inequity and
injustice. Several papers illuminate the intersectional nature of such bur-
dens. We hear, for example, how psychosocial challenges associated with
COVID-19 intersect with other dimensions of vulnerabilityfor example,
race, gender, age, and employmentas well as competing social obliga-
tions, such as the need to care for dependent family members or manage
economic instability within the household. Intersectional vulnerabilities
may compound life stressors that contribute to mental illness (Prohaska,
2020;Vickery, 2018). In addition, such vulnerabilities may limit the tools
and resources available to individuals as they struggle to cope with grief,
loss, and other life disruptions. As individuals, families, and communities
continue to grapple not only with the sequelae of COVID-19 but also with
the ongoing threat of future epidemic outbreaks, new ways of thinking
about and understanding coping are urgently needed.
Beyond their conceptual contributions, the essays in this collection
also foreground two innovations associated with journaling itself. First,
we highlight the value of online journaling as an innovative form of grassroots
collaborative ethnography. PJP's approach, which involves journaling on
an online, researcher-generated platform, leverages technology to
expand accessibility and participation while upholding anthropology's
epistemological commitment to foregrounding rst-person voices and
telling social stories(Murthy, 2008) in the context of participants' re-
alities and local moral worlds (Kleinman, 2006). We show how PJP
journalers produce diverse forms of knowledge and experience that are
not easily captured by researchers alone or through other digitally-based
methods. Furthermore, we show how online journaling can be part of a
participatory research strategy that helps transcend geographical limi-
tations and other physical obstacles to conventional ethnographic
approaches.
The result, which we have come to describe as grassroots collabora-
tive ethnography, is made possible rst and foremost by the accessibility
and ease of use of the PJP model. The platform was designed to be
accessible to anyone with a computer or smartphone, and the threshold
for participation is lowabout 10 min per week. It allows for exibility
in the degree and duration of participation; has broad eligibility criteria;
and provides multiple modalities for creating journal entriesincluding
written text, audio recordings, and images. The PJP platform allows
participants to download and save their own journals, which ensures that
all contributions can be retained by participants for their own purposes.
PJP has also made a commitment to sharing material collected with other
researchers, and the broader public, through online data sharing (in the
near term) and the construction of a publicly accessible historical archive
(in the longer-term).
Second, this special issue provides evidence for the promise of online
journaling as a form of psychotherapeutic intervention. The journals
analyzed here illuminate the everyday emotional struggles of different
groups of people as they contend with worlds turned upside down by
pandemic conditions. We see people thrust into situations and circum-
stances they had never imagined, without access to their usual sources of
support. We hear about families separated by the exigencies of precau-
tion, celebrations canceled, life plans put on hold. Under these circum-
stances of deep uncertainty and distress, these journals show how people
struggled not only to stay aoatmentally, physically, and nan-
ciallybut also to nd meaningful ways to name, understand, and pro-
cess what they were going through. The psychotherapeutic potential of
online journaling warrants further investigationand it has become a
central focus of several new targeted research studies in PJP's second data
collection phase.
Certainly, an online platform like PJP cannot replace therapy or other
forms of mental health treatment and intervention, as we note with
caution on the Mental Health Resourcespage of the PJP website. Yet
analysis of PJP data, including the papers in this special issue, shows how
PJP became an important quasi-therapeutic space for many of our par-
ticipants as they grappled with the emotional and psychological struggles
of pandemic life. While each story is unique, nearly all participants have
been touched, and at times completely shaken, by the disruptive impact
of COVID-19. Whether journaling functions primarily as a space for
reection and growth, a vehicle for catharsis, or simply a log of daily
activitiesor some combinationit seems to have the capacity to serve,
at least for some, as a useful medium for addressing psychological threat
and distress. This nding bolsters our call for further investigation.
3. Conclusion: directions for future research
Overall, this collection foregrounds the power of journaling as both a
research method and a therapeutic strategy, and it points to three pri-
mary areas requiring future research. First, as digital technologies
become increasingly present in spaces of everyday life around the globe,
the need for innovative approaches to online ethnographic research has
become increasingly pressing. Future studies should consider how jour-
naling can be used to promote inclusive, participant-driven research
approaches that facilitate broad public accessibility while achieving
population-level representation and methodological rigor. Furthermore,
journals provide a different form of engagement with participants than
do traditional ethnographic methods like semi-structured interviews and
participant observation. While journaling is by no means a replacement
for these other methods, the essays included here show how it can
generate intimate insights into a broad spectrum of everyday lived ex-
periences from a rst-person point of view. In particular, future research
should consider how journaling can complement other research methods
and create new opportunities for both knowledge production and
collaborative data analysis.
Second, the essays in this collection highlight the need for further
research on the potential role that online journaling may play in helping
people cope with experiences of crisis and disaster. Our ndings suggest
that the PJP platform may serve as a model for low-cost, high impact
interventions capable of reaching broad populations and promoting so-
cial connectivity, especially when more conventional therapeutic ap-
proaches (e.g., in-person support groups) are difcult to implement.
Given the high demand across the globe for mental health resources that
are both inclusive and accessible to diverse populations and commu-
nities, research on the potential of journaling as an innovative approach
to mental health support is both crucial and timely.
While a large body of scholarship has demonstrated the benets of
certain forms of therapeutic writingmost notably Pennebaker's (1997)
work on expressive writing”—the papers included here reveal other
ways in which a regular practice of producing and preserving one's
experience in writing, voice, and/or images may provide therapeutic
benet. As we have learned from presenting the PJP model to clinical
H.M. Wurtz et al. SSM - Mental Health 2 (2022) 100141
5
audiences in various elds, this form of journaling may open up new
channels of communication and new insights in clinical care contexts. It
may prove useful as a complement to one-on-one counseling, or to guided
discussion in support group settings. In some clinical contexts, such as
memory loss or geriatric care, it may offer a source of clinical insight for
patient-clinician dyadsor even patient-caretaker-clinician triads.
Furthermore, given that journaling has been associated with positive
outcomes in both mental and physical health conditions (Baikie and
Wilhelm, 2005;Glass et al., 2019;Hevey et al., 2012), future research is
warranted on regular journaling as a therapeutic intervention in health
domains beyond mental health (e.g., cardiovascular disease).
Finally, we have described PJP as a form of grassroots collaborative
ethnography. Not only has this approach generated a signicant amount
of research material from an impressively diverse array of participants in
the context of this particular research endeavor, but it has also demon-
strated the promise of online journaling as an innovative form of
archival activism(Carney, 2021;Flinn, 2011) that can support broader
strategies for promoting social justice. The demand for research strate-
gies that can help create more equitable conditions of knowledge pro-
duction, dissemination, and social engagement is increasingly clear and
pressing. The online journaling model introduced here provides insight
into some ways that such goals might be accomplished. The PJP platform
allowed journalers to choose whether, when, and in what form to
participate (i.e., text, audio recording, or uploading a photo), and PJP
was accessible to anyone over age 15 who could use the English or
Spanish interface. Journals preserved on the platform were created and
submitted by participants, on their own terms. Each time they created a
journal entry, they chose whether to keep it private for the next 25 years
(i.e., just for themselves and the research archive) or to allow the
research team to share it on the project's public-facing web page. By of-
fering anyone with a smartphone the opportunity to record their expe-
riences of hardship and distress in the ways they feel most comfortable, a
platform like PJP can help decolonize histories of the future through
archival activism (Zhang et al., 2020). At the same time, it can also create
opportunities for healing and community revitalization in the present
(Ria~
no Alcal
a, 2006). In these and other respects, creative intervention
strategies like journaling may create new opportunities for documenting,
understanding, and confronting the impact of pandemics as well as other
events capable of producing radical social change.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
HMW: Conceptualization, Writing original draft, Writing review
&editing, Visualization, Project administration. SSW: Conceptualization,
Writing original draft, Writing review &editing, Visualization,
Investigation, Data curation, Supervision, Project administration, Fund-
ing acquisition. KAM: Conceptualization, Writing original draft,
Writing review &editing, Visualization, Investigation, Data curation,
Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing nancial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to inuence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to all participants in the Pandemic Journal-
ing Project, to the contributors to this collection, and to past and present
members of the PJP Core Team, including Salma Mutwafy, Jolee Fer-
nandez, Ana Perez, Soa Boracci, Lauren Deal, Imari Smith, Emily
Nguyen, and Becca Wang. This paper analyzes data from the Pandemic
Journaling Project, which was founded in May 2020 by Sarah S. Willen
and Katherine A. Mason as a joint initiative of the University of Con-
necticut and Brown University. The project was developed with support
from Abigail Fisher Williamson (Trinity College) and Alice Larotonda.
More information about the project can be found at https://pandemic-j
ournaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/. PJP is supported by multiple spon-
sors at the University of Connecticut and Brown University, including
each university's Ofce of the Vice President for Research as well as the
Human Rights Institute, Humanities Institute and Ofce of Global Affairs
at the University of Connecticut and the Population Studies and Training
Center (supported by NIH center grant P2C HD041020) and Department
of Anthropology at Brown University.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100141.
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... Childcare issues [11,15] and parenting pressures [16] were emerging factors impacting careers, noted particularly among female physicians [16,17]. Additionally, increased levels of burnout and mental health burden were well documented among healthcare workers [18,19], with resultant concerns for a decrease in workforce availability as individuals considered alternate careers [20][21][22]. ...
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Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic onset had a global debilitating impact on individuals and on burgeoning careers. In 2021, the Children's Oncology Group Young Investigators Committee, Young SIOP (International Society of Paediatric Oncology) Network, and Young SIOPE (European Society for Paediatric Oncology) co-sponsored a survey to explore the impacts of the first year of the pandemic on early-career pediatric oncology professionals with respect to working practices, productivity, professional and career development, personal wellbeing, and changing childcare needs. Methods The survey comprised demographic, multiple-choice, and free-text questions, and was distributed via email and social media with English, French, and Spanish versions available. Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were used to compare quantitative data by self-designated gender and country of origin. Qualitative data were described using content analysis. Results Professionals (N = 499, 26.3% male, 77.2% MDs) in 48 countries (77.6% high income) responded in English (79.4%), Spanish (12.4%), and French (8.2%). Respondents had difficulty obtaining and keeping jobs (26.9%), worsened overall academic productivity (50.7%, with higher rates among bench scientists, p < 0.01), and decreased career opportunities (40.9%). Childcare challenges impacted 56.7% of respondents and was felt more negatively among women (p = 0.008) and in high-income settings (p < 0.0001). Qualitative data (n = 300) highlighted these differences were often attributable to diminished professional/personal boundaries and impacted their personal wellbeing. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted early-career academic and clinical professionals working in pediatric oncology, with unique challenges noted among those with childcare responsibilities. Career disruptions that resulted from the pandemic should be considered and mitigated by governing bodies and hiring institutions.
... The COVID-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief how stories could become strategies for making sense in complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing contexts. The Pandemic Journaling Project, 2 a study initiated by anthropologists at the University of Connecticut in May 2020, incorporated journal entries in text, audio, and image format from more than 1,800 people in 55 countries to illuminate how their everyday lives were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Wurtz, Willen, and Mason 2022). Images that people submitted to the project "to tell their own pandemic stories" were curated in an exhibition, "Picturing the Pandemic," that traveled to cities in the United States, Germany, and Mexico. ...
Article
Medical sociologists have much to gain by bringing in global health. In this article, I make the case for expanding our field by furthering sociological perspectives on global health. I reflect on my career, the influence of scholar-activist mentors, and my contributions to the development of scholarship about medicalization, narrative, and global health in medical sociology. First, I focus on medicalization, its relationship to biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization, and critiques of the medicalization of global health. Second, I analyze the narrative turn in studies of illness experiences and the inclusion of visual materials as an integral part of narrative studies of illness. Third, I explore global health and show examples of bodies of knowledge that medical sociologists are building. Although I present each as a distinct area, my discussion illustrates how the three areas are intertwined and how my contributions to each traverse and build connections among them.
... During the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health concerns have become prevalent (Bai et al., 2022;Yonemoto & Kawashima, 2023). Over the last few months, numerous news articles have revealed that many people are struggling with their mental health (Wurtz et al., 2022) and some have resorted to drastic measures in response (Duden et al., 2022). These concerns are ...
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In several ways, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has profoundly altered social and working environments. Social distancing policies, mandatory lockdowns, isolation periods, and the fear of becoming ill, in addition to the suspension of productive activity, loss of income, and fear of the future, all have an impact on citizens' and workers' mental health. Workplace factors can have a significant effect on whether people's mental health improves or deteriorates due to the pandemic. This article discusses Malaysian law's position on mental health and whether employers can be held liable for their employees' mental health. The goal of this article is to examine the legal aspects of workplace mental health issues. We conducted doctrinal research on existing laws and policies focusing on workers' rights issues related to mental health in the workplace during the pandemic. It is discovered that, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and sleep disorders are more likely to affect healthcare workers, particularly those on the frontlines, migrant workers, and workers in contact with the public. Job insecurity, long periods of isolation, and uncertainty about the future exacerbate the psychological condition, particularly among younger people and higher educational backgrounds. Therefore, numerous organisational and job-related interventions can help mitigate this scenario, but the regulatory mechanisms governing this matter must be clearly defined.
... Furthermore, studies on journaling among youth in the Global South remain limited. This collection provides a unique contribution by elevating stories crafted by young adults on their own terms, in their medium of choice, in a space where they hold the reins over how they wish to represent themselves and the things that matter most to them (Eidse & Turner, 2014;Wurtz et al., 2022). In addition, we show how multimedia approaches to journaling (versus conventional writing-based approaches) can help young people cultivate their autonomy, leverage their creativity, and foster connections and collaboration with others (de Jager et al., 2017;Lambert & Hessler, 2018;Wang, 2006;Winton, 2016). ...
Article
The COVID-19 crisis has taken a significant toll on the mental health of many students around the globe. In addition to the traumatic effects of loss of life and livelihood within students’ families, students have faced other challenges, including disruptions to learning and work; decreased access to health care services; emotional struggles associated with loneliness and social isolation; and difficulties exercising essential rights, such as rights to civic engagement, housing, and protection from violence. Such disruptions negatively impact students’ developmental, emotional, and behavioral health and wellbeing and also become overlaid upon existing inequities to generate intersectional effects. With these findings in mind, this special issue investigates how COVID-19 has affected the mental health and wellbeing of high school and college students in diverse locations around the world, including the United States, Mexico, Brazil, China, and South Africa. The contributions collected here analyze data collected through the Pandemic Journaling Project, a combined research study and online journaling platform that ran on a weekly basis from May 2020 through May 2022, along with complementary projects and using additional research methods, such as semi-structured interviews and autobiographical writing by students. The collection offers a nuanced, comparative window onto the diverse struggles that students and educators experienced at the height of the pandemic and considers potential solutions for addressing the long-term impacts of COVID-19. It also suggests a potential role for journaling in promoting mental wellbeing among youth, particularly in the Global South.
... Student journals were submitted as part of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), an online journaling platform and research study where anyone in the world over age 15 can chronicle their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic for inclusion in a historical archive (see Willen & Mason, 2023;Wurtz et al., 2022;Wurtz et al., this issue). PJP Phase One ("PJP-1") ran on a weekly basis between May 2020 and May 2022. ...
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In this article, we examine the Covid-19 experiences of a group of Chinese university students studying in the city of Guangzhou. We draw on journal entries that Chinese students submitted to the Pandemic Journaling Project between March and May 2022, along with follow-up responses in July and December 2022, to argue that these students spent most of their undergraduate years living in a state of “seesaw precarity.” We define seesaw precarity as a protracted period during which many Chinese were unable to predict from one day to the next whether they would be free to engage in the quotidian activities of everyday life. We trace student reactions and adaptations as they struggled to attend class, buy food, and see friends and family in the midst of unpredictable swings between openness and closedness. The seesaw nature of restrictions spurred considerable anxiety among the students we followed, but also produced an optimistic mindset we refer to as “anxious hope.” Participants accepted the necessity of Covid controls and felt it was incumbent upon them as individuals to adjust to this reality. They saw themselves as responsible for actively cultivating a positive mindset. Our findings suggest that the promotion of emotional self-care and anxious hope during the pandemic may have supported the viability of long-term controls as well as the acceptability of their sudden abandonment, while muting the possibility of resistance.
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Background The rapid global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affected different regions, communities, and individuals in vastly different ways that interdisciplinary social scientists are well-positioned to document and investigate. This paper describes an innovative mixed-methods dataset generated by a research study that was designed to chronicle and preserve evidence of the pandemic’s divergent effects: the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). The dataset was generated by leveraging digital technology to invite ordinary people around the world to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their everyday lives over a two-year period (May 2020-May 2022) using text, images, and audio. Methods and Findings PJP’s weekly, online, bilingual (English/Spanish) journaling platform was open to anyone with access to a smartphone or computer, including teens aged 15–17 with permission of a parent or guardian. Participants first completed a baseline quantitative survey, after which they were invited to create two journal entries in response to suggested narrative prompts. In each subsequent week, participants received weekly invitations to contribute via their choice of email or SMS (text message). Each invitation included a link to that week’s journaling prompts and accompanying survey questions. Participants could join the project at any point between May 2020 and May 2022. PJP employed a cohort design. Regardless of when they joined, all received the narrative prompts and accompanying survey questions in the same order. Participants could stop participating at any point, and they could later restart if they wished. The project welcomed any interested participant and sought to capture as broad a range of perspectives as possible, while also taking measures to include voices that might not otherwise be preserved in the historical record. The project launched in May 2020. In the two years it operated as a weekly journaling platform, PJP generated nearly 27,000 individual journal entries from over 1,800 people in 55 countries around the world. Data from PJP’s first phase (PJP-1) are now accessible at the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University. Conclusions The first phase of the Pandemic Journaling Project has produced an innovative multimedia dataset that can support studies of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected a wide range of communities across a wide range of outcomes including mental health, reproductive health, vaccine hesitancy, and trust in health professionals, among others. The dataset is available to researchers who follow established data protection protocols and procedures. These data protection measures will be in place for 25 years, through 2049, after which all PJP-1 data will become a fully accessible public archive via QDR.
Conference Paper
Artificial intelligence has shown promise in diagnosing mental illness in young children, a challenging task given the rise in teenagers struggling with mental health. We focus on the capabilities of machine learning and natural language processing models to accurately recognize activities that affect mental health in pre-teens and adolescents, an important step towards improving symptoms of depression and anxiety. We achieved an accuracy of 86.7% for determining sentiment from child journal entries with LSTM and BERT and a MSE of 94.6 for predicting future mental health outcomes with neural networks. We develop an innovative solution of incorporating these models inside of a mobile application as a scalable framework for data collection to track shifts in overall user wellbeing.
Chapter
Urban settings saw huge changes during the pandemic, such as the emptiness of urban public spaces during lockdowns, and the ways urbanites fulfilled that emptiness. I began a journal back in March 2020. It reports family life, my view about sociopolitical events, professional expectations, includes descriptions of urban settings and of urban-related situations. This chapter aims at sharing everyday scenarios that, resulting from individual experiences, are also common situations experienced by other people living in urban settings. It aspires to inscribe some written records during COVID-19 pandemic. This way, the chapter might be a contribution about the urban experience of the pandemic. The methodology for this chapter is content analysis of my personal journal, in an autoethnographic exercise. It considers the dimension of urban life, including categories related with urban situations, suburban experiences, urban mobility, and urban interactions, in an effort of trying to give sense to a rather illogical situation of living under a pandemic.
Article
Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID‐19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack of bodily attunement, interaction, and intersection with others in a world of places. This bodies‐in‐places perspective reveals important material dimensions of loneliness that have often been overlooked. Loneliness is understood not as a static characteristic of the individual, but rather as an embodied and emplaced relational and ecological phenomenon.
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This article draws on the journal entries of 62 healthcare professionals (HCP) in the United States and Canada who participated in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) during 2020–2021. The HCP in this article represented healthcare fields including medicine, nursing, physical therapy, social work, and clinical psychology. In their journal entries, HCP provided accounts of witnessing the death and bereavement of their patients and loved ones; experiencing their own loss of loved ones and important milestones; facing isolation from their networks and places of meaning; and juggling increasing workloads and caregiving activities. I illustrate how these four areas were impacted by guilt, duty, ethical deliberations, and gender disparities. I argue that HCP face an accumulation of distress when they witness grief and face loss without space to process these experiences.
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Black women in the United States experience considerable amounts of stress, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior studies have linked stress to adverse mental and physical outcomes for Black women and, moreover, shown that Black women are more susceptible to maladaptive coping, which compounds these risks. Research on the Superwoman Schema and Sojourner's Syndrome, for instance, shows how Black women are compelled to portray strength and resilience while suffering internally and experiencing poor health outcomes. These phenomena can be attributed to the historical expectations of Black women to be pillars of their families and sources of strength despite adversity and persistent institutional discrimination. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black women's greater likelihood of holding “essential worker” roles has further increased their risk of both COVID-19 exposure and heightened stress. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated long standing structural inequities and disparities between Black women and other racial/ethnic groups. Drawing on journal entries submitted by Black women participating in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a combined online journaling platform and interdisciplinary research study, this paper illuminates the voices of Black women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seventy-two Black women created journal entries using the PJP platform. We analyze the stories, idioms, and feelings they recorded during a global pandemic. We identify three prominent domains of stress: work and school, caregiving, and social (dis)connectedness. In addition to exploring manifestations of stress across these domains, we, discuss some of the mental health implications of COVID-19 and explore the potential for regular journaling as a possible mode of stress management among Black women.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic entered its second year, the New York Times published a column offering readers a name for its negative impact on mental health and well-being: “languishing.” Originally developed by positive psychologists, the term was designed to capture a sense of distress involving feelings of emptiness, stagnation, and lack of motivation that fall short of clinical significance. The column struck so strong a chord with readers that it was designated the most-read NY Times story of 2021. In this article, I examine how the concept of “languishing” traveled into U.S. popular discourse and consider the term’s emerging cultural valences and interpretive dynamics. I also examine key gaps and discrepancies between operationalized and vernacular usages of the term. Analysis focuses on a set of weekly journals created as part of the Pandemic Journaling Project, an online journaling platform and research study launched in May 2020. The journals show how a “psy” concept, once unmoored from its origins as a research construct, can become (re)invented as a cultural resource available to help people narrativize distress and, in some cases, name and confront injustice. Yet the popular appeal of “languishing” also raises urgent questions—in particular, about the growing role of positive psychology in both public and policy discussions about health and well-being. The field’s emphasis on individual-level behavior change tends to neglect the structural factors, ideological contexts, and relations of power that predispose some people to languish, and others to flourish, in the first place. While the language of “languishing” may prove helpful to some, its individual-level focus risks distracting us from another urgent need: to confront the root causes of today's profound and wide-reaching mental health burden—a burden that may not have been precipitated, but certainly has been exacerbated, by the ongoing pandemic.
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In this article we analyze the longitudinal journals of 32 Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) participants who were pregnant, planned a pregnancy, or gave birth between January 2020 and July 2021. Employing a grounded theory approach, we coded journals in NVivo for emerging themes related to the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on perinatal experiences in North America and Europe. In the paper we first provide some brief background on perinatal mental health and on the particular conditions for pregnancy and birth during Covid-19, before introducing major themes that emerged from the data, along with three in-depth case studies. We argue that the new mothers and prospective mothers in our sample associated new life with new feelings of loss during Covid-19. New motherhood during Covid-19 has meant for PJP participants a loss of seemingly irretrievable opportunities and moments that they see as necessary to establish themselves as mothers and integrate their babies into their families through a process of “kinning” (Howell, 2003). Feelings of loss associated with disruptions to kinning may be partially responsible for the increase in perinatal mental distress observed during the pandemic.
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The role of resilience in mediating the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of US women is poorly understood. We examined socioeconomic factors associated with low resilience in women, the relationship of low resilience with psychiatric morbidity, and the mediating role of resilience in the relationship between pandemic-related stress and other coincident psychiatric morbidities. Using a quota-based sample from a national panel, we conducted a web-based survey of 3200 US women in April 2020. Weighted, multivariate logistic regression was used to model the odds of pandemic-related stress, and coincident depression and anxiety symptoms among those with and without low resilience. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate resilience as a mediator of the relationship between pandemic-related stress and other coincident psychiatric morbidities. Risk factors for low resilience included younger age, lower household income, lower education, unemployment, East/Southeast Asian race, unmarried/unpartnered status, and higher number of medical comorbidities. Low resilience was significantly associated with greater odds of depression symptoms (OR = 3.78, 95% CI [3.10–4.60]), anxiety symptoms (OR = 4.17, 95% CI [3.40–5.11]), and pandemic-related stress (OR = 2.86, 95% CI [2.26–3.26]). Resilience acted as a partial mediator in the association between pandemic-related stress and anxiety symptoms (proportion mediated = 0.23) and depression symptoms (proportion mediated = 0.28). In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, low resilience mediated the association between pandemic-related stress and psychiatric morbidity. Strategies proven to enhance resilience, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and addressing socioeconomic factors, may help mitigate mental health outcomes.
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The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic's initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 (M = 6.92, SD = 2.55) participated as volunteers. About half the sample (50.7%) consisted of girls. Most mothers were cohabiting with a spouse (93%). Mothers completed online questionnaires about their perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, availability of social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and their children's behavior problems. Results showed expected significant associations between the mothers' reports about having little social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and children's externalizing problems. Likewise, expected significant associations were found between mothers' perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive parenting behavior, and children's internalizing and externalizing problems. Importantly, maternal anxiety and hostile/coercive parenting behavior mediated the associations between lack of support, negative perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, and children's behavior problems. These findings stress the importance of mothers' mental health and parenting behaviors for children's socioemotional adaptation in the context of COVID-19. Implications of the findings for family interventions intended to help parents and children at this time are suggested.
Article
Full-text available
The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic’s initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 (M = 6.92, SD = 2.55) participated as volunteers. About half the sample (50.7%) consisted of girls. Most mothers were cohabiting with a spouse (93%). Mothers completed online questionnaires about their perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, availability of social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and their children’s behavior problems. Results showed expected significant associations between the mothers’ reports about having little social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and children’s externalizing problems. Likewise, expected significant associations were found between mothers’ perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive parenting behavior, and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Importantly, maternal anxiety and hostile/coercive parenting behavior mediated the associations between lack of support, negative perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, and children’s behavior problems. These findings stress the importance of mothers’ mental health and parenting behaviors for children’s socioemotional adaptation in the context of COVID-19. Implications of the findings for family interventions intended to help parents and children at this time are suggested.
Article
This article is based on our analysis of a subset of data from the Pandemic Journaling Project-Phase 1 (PJP-1). The PJP, a collective, on-line journaling platform, was co-founded by anthropologists Dr. Sarah S. Willen and Dr. Katherine A. Mason in 2020. It has provided individuals with dedicated anonymous and confidential space to document and share their lived experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic over time (May 2020–May 2022). We employ a case study approach to closely analyze the journal entries of one Guatemalan woman, whom we call Crescencia, from our broader sample of 50 participants writing from within Latin America. Our analysis suggests that the PJP-1 platform provided a valuable space for Crescencia to cope with the distress of Covid-19 by fostering practices of self-reflection and social connectivity. We assert that the process of collective and anonymous online journaling through a platform like PJP-1 may not only provide space for some people to strengthen their sense of agency despite the uncontrollable conditions of crisis, but may also constitute an informal network of care through the sharing and preservation of one's experiences during the pandemic. Our findings point to the potential of PJP-type platforms in psychosocial interventions and mental health care practice to support individuals, families, and communities coping with hardship and trauma, which may be a particularly effective approach in resource-poor contexts where mental health care is scarce or stigmatized. PJP-1 may also provide a valuable model for future research approaches to understanding coping and resilience in similar conditions where in-person, in vivo research may not be viable, such as during armed conflict or the aftermath of environmental disaster.
Article
Loneliness is often conceptualized as a lack of quality relationships with friends and family. Other scholars have highlighted the importance of weak ties, or even strangers, for a sense of social belonging. In this article, data from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) are used to explore loneliness among US participants aged 25 to 64 in the context of pandemic restrictions in 2020 and 2021. Entries which included the keywords lonely/loneliness illustrate the importance of interactions with acquaintances and strangers, along with practices and places that convey a sense of social participation. Loneliness is not only a longing for close relationships, but a longing for social places and practices which often facilitate seemingly banal social interaction.
Article
Emerging data make clear that, while there are common pandemic experiences related to mental health across different populations, access to those shared experiences is often disproportionate. In the context of exploring expansive definitions of health as part of their Introduction to Urban Community Health course, students at a large, public university in New York City were given the opportunity to engage with the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) beginning in June 2020. This paper explores the impact of both creating their own journals, and reading and reflecting on the public entries of others, on student mental health, and on students' abilities to discuss and process their health status, holistically defined. It raises questions of how definitions of “normal” in relation to feelings of diminished mental health are shared and reified in the context of the pandemic, asking if the process of journaling might be a way not just to capture mental health histories of the pandemic, but also to create an inclusive, therapeutic space for a conversation around mental health.