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. 2022 Jul 23;12(8):249.
doi: 10.3390/bs12080249.

Exploring Trauma and Resilience among NYS COVID-19 Pandemic Survivors

Kip V Thompson  1 , Elizabeth Eder-Moreau  2 , Sara Cunningham  2 , Yuki Yamazaki  2 , Hang-Yi Chen  2
Affiliations

Exploring Trauma and Resilience among NYS COVID-19 Pandemic Survivors

Kip V Thompson et al. Behav Sci (Basel). .

Abstract

The New York State (NYS) Office of Mental Health created the NYS COVID-19 Emotional Support Helpline and enlisted graduate students to provide phone-based emotional support initially to the NYS community. This NYS-funded initiative transformed into providing psychosocial support for callers across the United States. Four NYS doctoral students acted as the helpline agents and received 251 individual calls from May-August 2020. The agents documented the calls with clinical notes which cannot be traced back to specific callers. The purpose of this retrospective qualitative study was to explore the themes that emerged from the calls to give voice to the trauma that callers were reporting during the early phases of the pandemic, and the resilience they demonstrated as they engaged with the Helpline. The agents' clinical transcripts were converted into codes using a critical-constructivist grounded theory approach (Levitt, 2021) with the NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. A second research team audited the initial codes for construct clarity. Emergent themes detailed the unique traumas that helpline callers divulged, how the agents provided support, and the callers' capacities for resilience. Recommendations are suggested to inform clinicians working with pandemic survivors, to offer guidance on providing distance or virtual interventions as well as to enhance policymakers' understanding of addressing mental health needs across populations served via the NYS COVID-19 Emotional Support Helpline.

Keywords: COVID-19; qualitative data analysis; resilience; supervision; telehealth; training; trauma.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure A1
Figure A1
Parent Nodes from COVID-19 Coding Structure. * Indicates those nodes that reflected the flow of most Helpline calls.
Figure A2
Figure A2
Parent, Child and Grandchild Nodes for Call Flow Codes.
Figure A3
Figure A3
Categorization of Trauma and Resilience.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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