60 minutes rewind hundreds of millions of americans are at home most of them don't want
to be simple choices about what to touch where to walk and what to wear are fraught more than 100
000 people have died worldwide fears about how much more those numbers could grow have stopped
much of daily life but the bills have not stopped coming though the paychecks in some cases have
we don't know when it will end it's a recipe for anxiety stress and grief which puts more of us
than ever before in a struggle to stay well the regiment of physical hygiene is well established
wash your hands stay six feet away cover your face but the rules for good mental hygiene
are not as clear psychologists told us that after americans get past the worst of it the worst of it
may not be over there may be mental health after shocks it's hard to predict and living with that
unpredictability is part of the challenge what does it feel like when that phone rings we run we
pick it up right away and we're just we're waiting just we don't even know what to expect we don't
know if they're going to tell us good news bad news we're just really anxious about it francesca
santacroce is describing the daily update from the hospital treating her father joseph a covid19
patient on a ventilator before the coronavirus hit her home in the close residential neighborhood of
staten island new york her father took care of the family while francesco worked in a doctor's office
saving money for medical school a 23 year old biomolecular sciences major she is the first
in her family to graduate college but when we first interviewed her at the approved distance
in her driveway two weeks ago francesco was shouldering her father's duties cooking cleaning
and caring for her sixteen-year-old sister and mother who needs five days a week of home dialysis
this video was shot by francesca's sister on a cell phone after their mother was also diagnosed
with covid19 i literally feel like i'm about to shatter in a million pieces right now i feel like
one wrong move and i'm going to break and i'm going to fall apart but i know that i can't i
can't do that because i need to take care of my family right now you've been doing this now for
a week yeah how long do you think it's going to last we don't know the doctors don't know we don't
know and i don't care how long it takes as long as he comes home uncertainty anguish and hope in
the age of coronavirus it's not just francesca who is straining the pandemic that has rocked
her family has touched nearly every american life in the last few weeks i think covet has dominated
all my sessions daniel kaplan is president of the new york state psychological association
and francesca's therapist he spoke to us with her permission everybody's racing to get back to
their previous lives but once that moment comes what psychological effects of this do you think
will linger i don't think the world's going to be the same i think the loss of jobs even after the
virus is gone people are still going to struggle they're going to struggle with how am i going to
pay my rent my mortgage how am i going to feed my family so it's going to be an ongoing stressor for
many people in this country and there's also a psychological benefit to doing productive work
sure right uh what do you do when a person had their identity taken away from them because they
no longer can work their identity taken away from them and then they can't move about to replace
that identity with any other useful purposeful activity absolutely it's a double whammy yeah
it is days blend together when so much of what used to distinguish them has been paused bridge
club is on hold graduation ceremonies are canceled this week's religious services have been virtual
those who live alone are vulnerable particularly the elderly but kaplan says we must all fight
against the blurring of the days by establishing a routine what happens if you don't have routine
when you don't have that structure that routine can for some people reduce their motivation to do
the activities that they still need to do but from home and long term they can become overwhelmed
oh i'm not accomplishing my goals and then they could spiral into a depression
many of us look for connection in social media and the news but too much of that can be harmful
a preliminary study done in china after the outbreak found that high social media exposure
nearly doubled one's chances of depression and anxiety we know already from previous disasters
that ongoing anxiety during trauma is a huge risk factor for ptsd and depression in the long
term you vulnera is the director of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder at the new york
state psychiatric institute he's a former israeli tank commander whose own traumatic experiences
in the 1973 yom kippur war informed his career studying the brains of veterans with ptsd
the brain is really obsessed about identification of fear you know of what is safe and what is
dangerous and what i wonder about though there is the part of the brain that is always alive to fear
right part of the brain that says it's okay don't be fearful because you've been through
this before but we've never been through this before so that's that's so true what we just said
because most of us don't have a comparable memory or set of memories that can serve
our understanding of what's going on right now neria led research and training efforts in new
york in the aftermath of the 9 11 attacks which has led him to be particularly concerned about
the health care workers on the front lines of this pandemic i mean we saw that after 9 11 and
we saw how many first responders really left out without sufficient medical care and psychiatric
in new york city at seven o'clock people open their windows they applaud but then what happens
when the clapping stops right neria estimates that after 9 11 one to five percent of new yorkers
suffered from ptsd four years after the attack he worries there will not be a plan or enough money
this time to treat a similar share of a vastly greater population there is kind of almost like
a honeymoon phase right now there is consensus high adrenaline adrenaline let's do that together
i think once this is ended and we face the reality of the aftermath coupled with financial
difficulties and shortage of services all of those things can rapidly elevate the risk for
a second pandemic which will be a mental health pandemic the story will continue after this
the cascading challenges were already falling on francesca santa croce
who was managing them through therapy but the day after we first talked to her the hospital called
her father joseph santacroce passed away he was 50 years old francesca i'm i'm very very sorry about
your father francesca told us she'd been unable to see or speak to her father in the hospital but
after he died she was given permission to enter the intensive care unit they walked me through the
icu to see him and just to see all those people on ventilators it was really sad as i walked in the
nursing staff all the physicians everyone who was on his case they were they were crying too they
were so upset and he looked like he was sleeping honestly and i said to him i'm here i'm gonna take
care of everyone you know everyone's in good hands you know i got this and i told him i loved him
and that he can you know that he can go to heaven and i'll take care of everyone down here
francesca's first task was taking care of her father's belongings and his car which
he had driven to the hospital and what was going through your head francesca as you're driving home
i apologize to him apologize why i didn't i was so sad that he had to you know go through that alone
that he had to spend his last week in quarantine you know he didn't get to talk to us or or see us
i wish that i was able to hug him one last time and tell him i love him one last time and
you know have him play a joke on me one last time if i would have known that this was coming i
would have used that time more wisely one of the areas of guilt and regret is not being able to
say goodbye what do you think are the challenges that francesca now faces she's in her early 20s
she is not financially secure mom is medically fragile just the anxiety around how do you float
the household and then long term how does she take care of the family while truly pursuing her dreams
the day francesca learned of her father's death jazz great wynton marsalis father checked into
a hospital he was in new orleans and you were in new york i was in new york yeah i was kind of torn
between if i go down and he doesn't have it and i bring it to him it's going to be worse four days
later ellis marsalis a respected jazz musician and teacher passed away from complications of covet
19. he was 85 years old he didn't complain he had a worldview he said man i don't determine my time
he said the fact that you lose a loved one is no more significant than all the other people
who are losing loved ones and that was always his philosophy we're all part of the same human family
he felt that he believed that he played it he taught it and uh you know and he accepted death in
that way also while marcellus grieves he is also responsible for jazz at lincoln center where he is
managing and artistic director the non-profit has had to close its performance space and has lost
millions of dollars and marcellus says things are even harder for freelance musicians and my father
was a freelance musician if this had happened when we were growing up we would literally just have to
go from house to house on our street and just just just to eat so this is a very serious time
for the survival of a lot of our musicians a man used to juggling projects he once
contributed to this broadcast marcellus has been touching base with musicians around the world
and trying to raise money for jazz at lincoln center and also for struggling artists all of this
returns him to the lessons of his father so if he taught you about philosophy as much as about music
what would his advice be for this moment we are in where we're sitting in an empty theater we
don't know when this is going to end people are suffering you know he would he would he would say
you know um where you at man what are you gonna do he said you talking about doing
you doing do something let's go so how does that work when you're talking to all the people who
are involved at jazz at lincoln center and i see almost the same mantra you know we
we're in a bad position and we're not going to get out of this
overnight but everybody is in our position so let's embrace this space let's work on the trust
that we've built up all of these years let's go out and make stuff happen that we want to see
happen we have to move very fast but we have to be even more process oriented and more deliberate
and that's how you master a moment of chaos and that is also the strength of jazz
i was just going to say jazz all of that practice and then in the moment you have to be ready
that's right you marshal all your forces and be ready to improvise and be ready to
meet the demands of that moment yeah another thing that we say to each other is let's see
if we are who we say that we were before we had to deal with this and what does that mean when
everything is normal it's easy for us to be full and and full of arrogance and commentary
now we have to be for real our morality our concept our integrity all these things are
coming to bear in this moment because it's a test yeah let's see man yeah we have a
tendency to hear all the negative everybody's dying isn't that a skull and crossbones there's
also this reaffirmation of what makes us great not just as people in a country as human beings
recognizing the good amidst the sorrow is at the heart of the second line funeral celebrations
of marsalis native louisiana when his mother died three years ago the jazz community took
up their instruments for ellis marsalis that celebration will be delayed since we're here in
this beautiful space would you would you like to play anything for your father oh yeah definitely
yeah i'll play something fun i wanna lay down my burden all right down by the riverside
me
you