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How is gun violence impacting our psychological well being as a society? NPR’s Ari Shapiro asks psychologist Erika Felix how we needs to be caring for ourselves amid numerous tales of lethal mass shootings.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Gun violence has an impression on psychological well being, and that is true far past the communities the place a capturing occurs. This yr, the U.S. has already had greater than 30 mass shootings, together with the 2 in California over the past week.
Erika Felix teaches psychology on the College of California, Santa Barbara. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ERIKA FELIX: Thanks for having me.
SHAPIRO: How does this relentless toll of mass shootings have an effect on individuals who may not be immediately within the path of the gunfire and even wherever close to it?
FELIX: Yeah. So I believe which you can liken this stuff to, like, a ripple in a pond, the place it reverberates out past the direct impression. You may see the concentric circles rippling out from that.
SHAPIRO: If we use your analogy of the ripples, let’s go nearer to the place that drop goes into the water. Some communities have way more gun violence than others, and the vast majority of gun violence will not be mass shootings.
FELIX: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: What impression does residing in that neighborhood have on individuals, even when their family members, buddies or relations should not immediately within the path of the gun fireplace?
FELIX: Effectively, they’re underneath fixed stress. For individuals who need to take care of it each day as they go to work or stroll to highschool, they’ve elevated ranges of hypervigilance. And that erodes our psychological well being and our bodily well being.
SHAPIRO: We’re speaking about psychological well being penalties broadly. Are you able to converse particularly about what the precise impression is on individuals?
FELIX: Yeah. So whether or not we witness it on the information or stay locally or we have been there on website, you possibly can have a big elevation in feelings of hysteria, fear, issues with sleeping. All of that’s utterly comprehensible. And from…
SHAPIRO: Even if you happen to’re not locally? Even when you do not know the individuals affected?
FELIX: Sure. After we’re watching the information, we really feel the misery. We now have this empathy part of ourselves as human beings. However for some individuals, particularly who skilled essentially the most losses, there’s an elevated potential for post-traumatic stress dysfunction or despair, problems and the comprehensible grief course of if you happen to misplaced a beloved one in a violent approach.
SHAPIRO: Clearly, the perfect answer can be to finish gun violence. However what particular steps are you able to recommend individuals take to scale back a few of these detrimental psychological penalties?
FELIX: Sure. Within the rapid aftermath, one of many essential issues is to get social help. We had a mass homicide tragedy have an effect on our neighborhood.
SHAPIRO: In Santa Barbara.
FELIX: In Santa Barbara in 2014. So what individuals discovered most useful was the actions the place they got here collectively as a neighborhood. It might even simply be a potluck and simply be round different people who find themselves experiencing comparable issues.
SHAPIRO: That is so attention-grabbing to me {that a} vigil, for instance, is not only a present of solidarity or a press release of neighborhood. It is really therapeutic.
FELIX: It’s. And really, once I surveyed our college students at UCSB following the mass homicide tragedy, that was one of many issues they discovered most useful. And it was essentially the most broadly attended. All of that stuff college students rated as actually useful of their coping within the rapid aftermath.
SHAPIRO: As members of the media report on these shootings week after week, are there methods you want information organizations would strategy these tales in a different way which may scale back the hurt?
FELIX: I admire the shift that I’ve seen in information media the place there’s concentrate on the neighborhood and survivors and there is restricted protection on the perpetrator. I believe that is been a fantastic shift. I’ve additionally actually appreciated when the media has gone again to communities that skilled this years in the past and simply talked about how they’re coping within the long-term aftermath, I believe is useful as increasingly individuals take care of this.
SHAPIRO: That is Erika Felix, professor of medical psychology on the College of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks very a lot.
FELIX: Thanks.
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