It's Depression Mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

In March of this year, I got my first COVID vaccine. I did the Pfizer, the P-Fiz, the Fize dog.

I got it after almost exactly a year of isolation, precaution, distance, masking, and otherwise

changing everything about how I'd been living.

The first dose meant I could still catch COVID, but I wouldn't die from it, which is something

I'd been afraid of for a year. Then exactly three weeks later,

I got the second dose and I was on my way to being, and I put a question mark at the end here,

safe. But the two shots in the arm won't make everything else that happened go away. There's no

cure for that. We have spent much of the year in mortal

fear. A tiny, tiny clump of cells invisible to the naked eye has been out there, easily

breathed in, and then you might die. Someone you love might die, just as well over half a million

people did.

We've all been changed by this forever.

And the word I keep thinking of for what we've all been through is trauma.

Trauma is something that doesn't go away once the inciting event has passed.

It stays and it creates problems.

It's the gift that keeps on taking.

Are we as a collective society traumatized? I reached out to my friend Dr. Ken Duckworth. He's the

medical director for Nami, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And we started with a definition.

Thank you. And we started with a definition. Trauma is a psychological experience, which many people find overwhelming or a direct threat to their safety.

So if you look at trauma, you find that people hyper experience the experience,

they feel numb to the experience, or they feel closed off, undigested movies, if you will,

...