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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 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.
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 first 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 finds
herself “dusting off”her sewing machine to make cloth masks with fil-
ters—all 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 define as a research
approach that emphasizes both broad public accessibility and the co-
production of knowledge with our interlocutors.
In the first 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 15–17
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 difficulties (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 difficult
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 benefits 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
fields 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 first-
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 file. Participants
completed a baseline quantitative survey when they first 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 first, 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 scientific 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-five 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) identified 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 significant
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 specific mental health dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic. We
invited contributors to request datasets based on specific quantitative
and/or qualitative parameters of the overall PJP-1 archive. Contributors
could request a dataset defined by demographic criteria (or other
quantitative survey responses, such as bi-weekly mental, physical and
emotional health questions); qualitative responses to specific journaling
prompts; and/or designated keywords. Contributors specified 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 first four papers
focus on specific 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 final 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
motherhood—a process called “kinning”(Howell, 2003). Drawing upon
the journals of thirty-two mothers and prospective mothers who were
pregnant or gave birth during the first 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 findings have important
Table 1
Demographic characteristics for full PJP-1 sample.
#%
Gender
Female 1460 79%
Male 319 17%
Other 39 2%
Age
15–19 428 23%
20–29 447 24%
30–39 255 14%
40–49 207 12%
50–59 200 11%
60þ283 16%
Race/Ethnicity
a
Asian/Pacific 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 difficulty 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 you”in 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 findings 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-
flected 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 benefits of journaling—both in general and in relation to specific
health conditions—the authors call attention to the paucity of research
on whether these findings 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., staffing 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 findings
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 Defining Health and Finding Wellness through the Journaling
Process in New York City,”Baines offers a first-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 reflection 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 reflection 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-
sified 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 adults—apopula-
tion that often is overlooked in discussions of unmet mental health needs.
The final 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, finds
ways of coping with the mental health distress of COVID-19 through
processes of both self-reflection and social connectivity. In the crucible of
pandemic conditions, Crescencia finds new meaning in her relationships
with herself and others and creates a moral roadmap for navigating the
“new normal”of 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 findings 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 final 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 “languishing”in
conversation with other concepts like depression, anxiety, and trauma,
the essay also explores the kinds of definitional 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-
nificance as they become vernacularized. Overall, Willen cautions that
languishing—like its countervailing concept in positive psychology,
flourishing—may 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 first 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 angst—all of
which influence 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
significant 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 vulnerability—for example,
race, gender, age, and employment—as 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 first-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 first 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 low—about 10 min per week. It allows for flexibility
in the degree and duration of participation; has broad eligibility criteria;
and provides multiple modalities for creating journal entries—including
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 afloat—mentally, physically, and finan-
cially—but also to find meaningful ways to name, understand, and pro-
cess what they were going through. The psychotherapeutic potential of
online journaling warrants further investigation—and 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 Resources”page 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
reflection and growth, a vehicle for catharsis, or simply a log of daily
activities—or some combination—it seems to have the capacity to serve,
at least for some, as a useful medium for addressing psychological threat
and distress. This finding 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 first-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 findings 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 difficult 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 benefits of
certain forms of therapeutic writing—most 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
benefit. 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 fields, 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 dyads—or 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 significant 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 financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
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, Sofia 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 Office of the Vice President for Research as well as the
Human Rights Institute, Humanities Institute and Office 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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