This week, Farai speaks to Dr. Raven Baxter about the effects of “long COVID” and the power she discovered from her own personal journey with the illness. In "Our Body Politic Presents..." Tonya Mosley of the podcast “Truth Be Told” interviews her mother and parenting coach Yolanda Williams about the joys and challenges of raising free and healthy Black children in today’s world. On our weekly segment Sippin' the Political Tea, Farai talks with former Obama White House Health Policy Director Dr. Kavita Patel and psychiatrist and activist Dr. Kali Cyrus about mental health and equity in healthcare when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Farai Chidya:
Hi, folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We are here for you, with you, and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chidya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chidya. More than two years after the first COVID lockdowns, the urge to claim victory over the virus is strong, and yet public health experts warn we are not out of the woods. That feeling of not being out of the woods and not knowing what comes next is especially familiar to the millions of Americans living with long COVID symptoms. Roughly one in 10 people who contract COVID will develop long-term symptoms. That's according to a study release last month by the CDC.
Farai Chidya:
Science educator and molecular biologist Dr. Raven Baxter, known as Dr. Raven the Science Maven, has long COVID and she's used her powerful social media feed to chart her journey. She has gotten many accolades for her work, including being a recent Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and she's long been working to make STEM fields more inclusive, telling future scientists that no matter what their race, gender, or cultural background, they are needed.
Farai Chidya:
At a time when long COVID has been draining her energy. Dr. Raven generously shared her time to talk with us about her work and her health journey and give some perspective to other people facing long COVID themselves.
Farai Chidya:
Dr. Raven, I am so thrilled to have you on. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chidya:
I have just really admired how you have been evolving on the Twitters, and we're going to get to your specific health journey, which is a lot of what you've been tweeting about, but your work as a science communicator has garnered you over 100,000 followers on Twitter. You are making moves. So can you just give us a little bit of a taste of your background in the sciences?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
Sure. I am a lifelong science enthusiast because I feel like I popped out the womb as a scientist and just with this natural curiosity for the world. There's so many questions to ask and find answers to in science and it's the most fun of a rabbit hole that I've ever chased down.
Farai Chidya:
You recently have had a big journey in your own health. You have been a science maven communicating and you got COVID, and not one of the in and out cases. I got COVID in early December and I felt a lot of mental and physical fatigue, but it did disappear in about a month, but tell us a little bit about your journey.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I got COVID in mid-December of 2021, and I had a case that resembles a flu, but a really severe flu. And my initial infection period lasted about a week and a half, but then I would say that progressed into lingering symptoms that looked quite a lot different than what my initial infection was. And so the lingering symptoms were neurological issues, fatigue, immense fatigue, digestive issues, I had a total lack of appetite, I had hearing loss and impairment.
Farai Chidya:
And you talked about people complimenting you on your weight loss and you're like, "Uh, actually, this is a situation." How does it feel to live your recovery in public and have people who don't really understand what you're going through say things to you or question things?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
Yeah, during my recovery, I've learned so much about what it means to be chronically ill or have a disability. I really feel for people who are dealing with this. It's hard. It can feel really lonely, especially when people don't understand what you're going through, especially when they look at you and they say, "Well, you're skinny, you look healthy." There's always so much going on underneath it all.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
And so it can be frustrating, but there's been a lot of teachable moments in the past few months for me to talk about chronic illness and disability and what it means to me.
Farai Chidya:
We've had on Alice Wong of Disability Visibility, which is a multimedia project that talks about disability and is centered in the experience of many different types of people, including people of color with disabilities, and the level of expectations that people need to risk their own lives to conform to some punitive social norm is pretty amazing, amazing meaning kind of terrifying.
Farai Chidya:
And so, how do you talk to people, if you do, about the idea that wearing masks even as we are dropping mask mandates is also something that affects people who have immunocompromised systems or other health conditions? How do you talk to people about that?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I want to say that wearing a mask is not a foreign idea to many societies around the world. I've seen my friends who live in different places in China wearing a mask before the pandemic started and it's very much a normal thing.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
And so I think we really need to start working on a bit of a culture shift here and realize, hey, we might not have been a society focused on wearing a mask, but now we are and we have to make that pivot. And, yeah, changes can be uncomfortable, but can also be very necessary. In this case, it's necessary to save lives, meaning keep people from dying, but also keep people from being infected and also keep people from getting long COVID.
Farai Chidya:
One of your recent tweets said, "Two months ago, I could barely take 10 steps and now I can take 1,000. I am so proud of myself," and you talk about having a long way to go. How are you feeling about the trajectory of your recovery and what has it taken you, I don't know if spiritually is the right term, but spiritually or emotionally to have to wrap your brain around the changes that you wake up to every day and have to figure out where your health is?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I'm still figuring it out, to be honest. Even in this interview, I have shortness of breath. I'm kind of gasping for air a little bit after every few words. I don't normally talk like this. It's tough. I have a lot going on and I'm not really there yet to be giving advice to people on how to get through this.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
It's very intense physically, it's very intense emotionally, not only because of the just pure emotional aspect of this, but COVID also impacts your mood. You can get brain inflammation and that can impact your mood.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
And so I think that support groups are really important and have been very instrumental to my progress. I take it day by day. I've learned not to expect anything because you never know what the next day will be like. And I just try to make it through each day honestly. It's really not easy.
Farai Chidya:
I know that you said you're not in a position to offer advice to other people, but to the extent that there's things that you've had to deal with on your journey that are super practical, what kinds of things have you been thinking about?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I'm thinking about how there are doctors who will sweep your symptoms under the rug and say, "Oh, you're just having anxiety," or, "You need more sleep," stuff like that, all because they don't really know anything about long COVID and they don't really know how to address your issues.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
So I think it's important to try to find someone who does have a solid foundation of knowledge about long COVID, joining an advocacy group or a support group. There's plenty of them. Are you all affiliated with the Body Politic COVID support group?
Farai Chidya:
No, but I was really fascinated. After we launched, I had heard about them. There are different Body Politics. Why don't you tell us a little bit about them?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I am a member of their long COVID support group and it's been amazing. We have a giant several thousand member Slack community and there's a victories channel where people talk about their recovery and the little victories or huge victories and everything in between that they have along the way. It's super uplifting just to see how far people have come.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
And then there's also a 24/7 Zoom chat room that you can just pop into the chat anytime to cry, vent, or just say hi or be silent. And we have trivia nights on Saturdays and that's a lot of fun.
Farai Chidya:
Yeah, and we will provide access to that, but we are bodypolitic.com/COVID-19. How have you thought about, circling back to your social media feed, which is how I've been tracking your progress, social media is a very complex space, but it seems to me that you are using it in an incredibly powerful way, but does that also take stuff out of you?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
Well, yes and no. I'm not here to be a suit, I'm not here to be a lab coat, I'm here to be me. I don't fit the bill for what mainstream science is. I want to make science a place where everyone feels comfortable and a part of that is being exactly who you are to normalize authenticity in science so that anybody can feel like they belong because they can be themselves.
Farai Chidya:
Imagine that you were talking to sixth graders about science, which I'm sure that you've done before, what would you tell them about this world, maybe talking to different types of kids who might not have thought about this before as a path for them?
Dr. Raven Baxter:
I would say get ready to have so much fun. I think that science is the gift that keeps on giving. It's like this adventure that you can go on your entire life and never get tired of it. There will be some challenges along the way, but I love science and nobody can take that away from me no matter what.
Farai Chidya:
Dr. Raven, I just want to say I'm so grateful to you for making time for us at a time when you need rest. And it means so much to me that you were willing to talk to Our Body Politic and share with us. And I wish you rest and I wish you healing. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
Thank you.
Farai Chidya:
That's Dr. Raven the Science Maven, molecular biologist and popular science communicator. You can follow her work on Twitter, @ravenscimaven.
Farai Chidya:
Coming up next, this week, the Our Body Politic Presents series brings you more gems from Truth Be Told on tips for raising healthy, free Black children.
Yolanda Williams:
As I'm going down this journey to positive parenting, I'm also starting my decolonizing journey. I'm also realizing there's a really big piece missing in how we talk about parenting with black Parents.
Farai Chidya:
Plus, Sipping the Political Tea on the pandemic and mental health, that's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chidya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. With Our Body Politic's Presents series, we bring you stories and conversations from independent voices in audio. This week, we bring you highlights from the episode Protection from Tonya Moseley's podcast, Truth Be Told. It centers on parenting coach, Yolanda Williams, who works with Black parents to push beyond their personal fears and anxieties around raising free and healthy Black children.
Farai Chidya:
Let's take a listen to Protection from Truth Be Told.
Tonya Moseley:
Hey, Mom, how are you?
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Hey, Tonya. Okay, how are you? Doing good.
Tonya Moseley:
My mom is amazing. She raised me and my brother in Detroit by herself and she did it while working every day, and at one point going to school full-time to get her master's degree. She also treated our education like it was another full-time job, always involved in searching for the best schools and camps and programs. She gave me permission to let my imagination run wild.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
I wanted to believe that we were going to see something magical or whatever.
Tonya Moseley:
If there is a such thing as an upside to poverty, this is it. We didn't have a lot of money, so my mom used her imagination to bring joy into our house, but that didn't take away the stress of being broke and trying to raise two kids alone. She yelled a lot, and when I was a kid, I didn't understand it until I had my own children.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
You sort of raise a child like you were and I did raise my voice.
Tonya Moseley:
You hollered a lot.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Yeah. Okay. Let me just say that then, I did holler a lot. I'm not going to deny it, but I tried to refrain from whoopings or beatings because I got a lot of those. And that's like old school. Our parents would get switches and belts and it was normal. It was normal in our community. We would have whips on our legs, you know, "Go get me a switch or my belt."
Tonya Moseley:
She's right about it being a normal thing in our community. I mean, so many of us have stories, right? Like parenting coach, Yolanda Williams, her mom raised her alone too and Yolanda didn't exactly feel like she was wanted.
Yolanda Williams:
My mom was in survival mode. And when you're in survival mode, it's really hard to form deep connections with your children when it's just a constant state.
Tonya Moseley:
This realization about her own mother is part of what Yolanda learned while figuring out her own journey to motherhood.
Yolanda Williams:
I was 36 when I got pregnant, okay? I was well on my way to live in my bougie [inaudible 00:15:37] dreams. I didn't like children and I didn't want to be around them. And I realized, and it wasn't until after I had my daughter, Gia, I realized that was because of how I was raised. I felt like I was a burden and so I saw children as burdens. I didn't see them as the wonderful teachers that they are that now I can see them as, but before, I was just like, "They're loud, they require a lot, you got to spend all your money on them, ain't nobody got time for this. I don't want that responsibility." And I understood that I wasn't in a place mentally and emotionally to be who I thought a parent should be.
Tonya Moseley:
And so when Yolanda made peace with having a baby girl, she started studying and searching for community. Big questions were coming up for her like what does it mean to raise children under systemic oppression, and at the same time, try to resist oppressive systems? These questions led her to create the online space, Parenting Decolonized.
Yolanda Williams:
I want to discuss the impacts of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy on parenting, on children, and also discuss what I call and what people hate to hear, adult supremacy and childism.
Tonya Moseley:
Woo, we'll get to all of that, including what it means when she says adult supremacy and childism, but first, Yolanda and I got into the first step of decolonizing our parenting, and that's dealing with your own trauma.
Tonya Moseley:
You alluded to what it was like growing up with your mother. What kind of mother was she?
Yolanda Williams:
I mean, my mother was a single mom, we grew up kind of poor. And so there was some alcoholism. We got whooped, we got yelled at a lot. I have two sisters, I'm the oldest of three. So we knew that we had to act a certain way. We knew we had to be cautious in certain situations.
Tonya Moseley:
You internalized and knew what your mother was going through. You understood the place that she was in and you knew how to react based on that.
Yolanda Williams:
Exactly that. We definitely... You had to learn how to read someone. From the moment my mother woke up until she went to bed, I had to figure out how to protect myself. And I'm not saying that she was in there beating on me, but just when someone is in survival mode, they can project that onto you. So it'll be a look, it'll be a tone of voice, it would be getting hit sometimes, being yelled at, name calling.
Yolanda Williams:
And so you have to figure out what can I say, what can I do to make everything easier? And that's a lot to do as a child because you can't be a child anymore. You have to be quiet. You have to go sit down somewhere. You can't question anything, and I definitely did not want that for my own house at all.
Tonya Moseley:
When you finally realized you were pregnant, Gia was coming into the world, you started reading parenting books, experts. What were those books and those experts not giving you as a Black mother?
Yolanda Williams:
Yeah, I remember I read Brain Rules for Baby. I really wanted to understand brain development because I didn't understand that. That was important to me and that's how I got drawn into positive parenting and the gentle parenting movement.
Yolanda Williams:
And so I went and sought out parent coaches and parent experts in that area and I came across people like Janet Lansbury and Rebecca [inaudible 00:19:21] and white women. And so when I would go onto their pages and I'm looking at them just like, "This does not seem realistic for me. I don't talk like this. Who talks like this?"
Yolanda Williams:
And so I went and I found a Black positive parenting group and I joined that group. And that was what really helped educate me, to see that there was so many more of us doing this work, that I wasn't alone and that I could ask questions in a safe way. Only problem was that group was also full of respectability, which at that point I was becoming more radicalized.
Yolanda Williams:
So as I'm going down this journey to positive parenting, I'm also starting my decolonizing journey. I'm also realizing there's a really big piece missing in how we talk about parenting with Black parents. So this group was so respectable that I was just like, "I got to start my own because I can't do this with y'all."
Tonya Moseley:
And when you say respectable, what do you mean by that?
Yolanda Williams:
We still have people in this group, this Black parenting group, saying things like, "Race doesn't matter." The founder of the group said something to the effect of, "My sons get really upset whenever they see a Black girl and he says hi and they don't smile. I really think that we need to figure out how to teach our Black girls how to be more friendly." And I was just like, "You ain't got to worry about me." I was like, "Man, you have lost your damn mind. Teach your son that we do not have to smile and giggle for him." I was like, "This is feeling real patriarchal, white supremacist up in here, so let me go ahead and go [inaudible 00:21:09]." So I got with another friend of mine and we started our group.
Farai Chidya:
You're listening to the Our Body Politic Presents series. This week, we're bringing you the podcast Truth Be Told with their episode Protection with parenting coach Yolanda Williams on raising healthy, free children.
Tonya Moseley:
I'm really struck by the use of adult supremacy and I think I know what you're talking about. You describe parenting your daughter as being a co-creator of her life. That is really interesting. What does being a co-creator look like with a child?
Yolanda Williams:
So Gia is four. She's autistic. She is non-speaking. And I still feel like we are trying to co-create, and I say trying because I don't always get it right. And what that means for me is I'm allowing her to teach me stuff and I teach her at the same time. I learn from Gia a lot.
Yolanda Williams:
And so when I think about co-creating, I'm just thinking about the fact that she is a whole person without me. She is not my mini me. She is her. She is Gia. She has thoughts and feelings and wants and things that I need to learn in order to allow her to be herself.
Yolanda Williams:
The one thing I never want to do is make her feel like who she is not good enough, because that's how I felt growing up. But as I parent her, I want her to look at me as not just this authority figure. I want her just to see me as someone that she's safe with, someone that... Almost like intergenerational solidarity because she is able to make decisions sometimes and do things sometimes that I didn't realize she could do because I didn't let her do them.
Tonya Moseley:
So at the heart of your work is your desire for your daughter to be liberated and carefree and confident. And I agree with you on that, but when I read that, I thought about how so many times in my life I've heard people say with a little disdain in their voice, specifically Black folks, "Well, white parents let their kids just do anything and be free," as if that is an amoral position to be in, to let your children be themselves. Say more about that.
Yolanda Williams:
Do you hear the programming? There's programming there. That's a program. [inaudible 00:23:44] programmed to not see ourselves as free, as equal as people who are fully humans. We're programmed to see ourselves that way and they're programmed to see us that way.
Yolanda Williams:
So that's why when people are like, "That's some white people stuff," I'm just like, "Who told you that? Who told you that? Because last time I checked, our ancestors back on these plantations, they learned how to be parents from white people. So who told you that?"
Yolanda Williams:
We learned this brutality from white people. The majority of people in this country are white. So can we stop pretending like it's only Black folks that are violent or white folks that are able to be loving and gentle? That's not the case.
Tonya Moseley:
I think at the heart of it though, consciously people are thinking, "Oh, I'm keeping my Black children safe. It's not about letting my child do and be who they are, it's about them being safe."
Yolanda Williams:
And that's the constant tightrope, even me that I walk as I'm doing this work because I'm never going to be at the final destination of conscious parenting. This is a journey and it changes as Gia grows and as I grow and as I age.
Yolanda Williams:
The thing is we know historically because of the violence of whiteness that our children can be snatched from us at any time. We know this. We discuss intergenerational trauma, but we talk about it from a place of we're passing down this trauma to our children, but what we're really passing down is an awareness of whiteness, almost like in innate like, "We need to survive this." We are constantly walking around in fear and anxious, and nothing good can never come from that.
Yolanda Williams:
But I'm looking at it more of as a survival technique. I'm looking at it as my body knows looking at my daughter I got to keep her safe, but I refuse to be the oppressor in order to keep her safe.
Tonya Moseley:
To this point you're making, there was this study done back in 2015 by Pew Research that found that we hold onto this belief that physical discipline is necessary to keep Black children out of the streets, out of prison, out of police officers' sight, but it doesn't do that. We adopted this practice of beating children from white slave masters. This is well-documented and historians have found no evidence that this form of physical discipline existed before West African societies came here during the slave trade, but somewhere along the way, we adopted this idea that beating our children is biblical. How did that happen?
Yolanda Williams:
This is why I like to look at things from a systemic point of view, it's like systems thinking, because when you start to look at it that way, you realize how all of these systems play into each other, right?
Yolanda Williams:
So we have the systems of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy at the top, and then what comes underneath those things are all the isms, the racism, the sexism, the childism. In the middle of those, what keeps all of that in place is religion, because if we didn't have religion, you wouldn't be able to oppress the Black people. You wouldn't be able to dehumanize them in that way. You wouldn't have been able to do that to women. You wouldn't be able to do that to children.
Yolanda Williams:
So when we start looking at these systems and how they all work together, it really behooves us to be like, "Who does this benefit for us to continue to do this?"
Yolanda Williams:
And I think the issue is that we have really internalized that we deserve violence, that we cannot learn without it. Because I want to understand how you feel like your child cannot possibly learn without being hurt. And I'm not just talking about physical, I'm talking about verbally too, because a lot of parents will be like, "Well, I don't hit my child," but then you are cussing them out or calling them names or making them do military exercises or putting them in timeout, which is pretty much isolation.
Yolanda Williams:
And then I want us to also look at the parallels to the carceral system, because we're out here in these streets marching, talking about how our lives matter, but then we go home and we duplicate harmful systems of oppression in the carceral state and in white supremacy and in patriarchy. How that work? We have to look at who is this benefiting for us to continue on this path, because if we really look outside these windows and in this world, and historically, most people across race and cultures hit their kids, is it working? Is this world a better place? Are we more prosperous?
Tonya Moseley:
As Yolanda said, part of this work of decolonizing our parenting practices is also giving grace to ourselves and the people who raised us, to forgive your parents for being human. In many ways, it's forgiving yourself for the missteps and mistakes we all make. I shared a little of this with my mom.
Tonya Moseley:
Yeah, the epiphany that I had when Yolanda told me that she grew up not feeling wanted was that I think when your parents are in a fight or flight state like you, you were in survival mode as a single mother-
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Yeah. Yes.
Tonya Moseley:
That we as children can interpret that as, "That I am a burden," versus, "This is just a person who is trying to survive and make it and do the best for their kids." It really is an epiphany.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Did you ever feel like that?
Tonya Moseley:
I think there are parts of it. When you say things like, "You weren't planned," those things, they do make you feel like, "Well, if I wasn't a part of this, things might be easier." You just internalize it a little bit.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Yeah. I can understand it.
Tonya Moseley:
But now I understand it though. That is the gift of this conversation and learning this stuff, is once I can see it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt any less, but it makes me realize that it wasn't true.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
Anytime you want to ask me anything, I look forward to our conversations. I'm looking forward to sharing with you and I'm going to reexamine myself to continue to try to grow.
Tonya Moseley:
Aw. Thank you, Mom.
Tonya Moseley's Mom:
All right.
Farai Chidya:
That was the podcast Truth Be Told hosted by Tonya Moseley and their episode Protection. You can subscribe to Truth Be Told wherever you get your podcasts. On Twitter, they're @deartruthbetold.
Farai Chidya:
Coming up next, our weekly round table sip in the political tea gives us some wisdom about how to advocate for yourself with your medical providers and the pandemic's impact on our mental health with Dr. Kavita Patel and Dr. Kali Cyrus.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
We've been in a marathon for two to three years at this point and that you are going to need time to recover. I think we're going about our day-to-day while all of these catastrophes are happening and not accounting for the fact that there has been stress on stress on stress.
Farai Chidya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Farai Chidya:
Each week on the show, we bring you a round table called Sipping the Political Tea. Joining me this week is Dr. Kavita Patel, primary care physician and former Obama White House Health Policy Director. Welcome back, Dr. Patel.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
Thank you for having me, Farai.
Farai Chidya:
And we've got Dr. Kali Cyrus, psychiatrist and activist in Washington, D.C. Hi, Dr. Cyrus.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Hi. So happy to be here.
Farai Chidya:
This week, we're going to discuss the pandemic's impact on mental health, the broader questions of equity in healthcare, and how we can all be better medical advocates for ourselves and for our loved ones.
Farai Chidya:
I want to start with you, Dr. Cyrus. In a USA Today Suffolk University poll, nearly 9 in 10 respondents said the US was in a full-blown mental health crisis. I will say that before the studio time today, I had a meeting with my psychiatrist who I see quarterly just to check in. And I was like, "Well, I'm having some stressful family issues. Do you think I should go on an antidepressant?" And she was like, "It's spring. You'll probably get a mood boost from that." And being able to have someone who has treated me for years and who I can discuss these things with has been really helpful.
Farai Chidya:
But as a psychiatrist, how are you seeing this pandemic play out for people who may not have already established a trusted relationship with someone around their mental health or may not have money or may not trust the system?
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Really good question. I think the main thing about why this is a crisis is because people don't have access to that before all of this happened and are now scrambling or really trying to dive in and find someone to get that help from.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I know at least myself and other colleagues, our emails, our phone lines, people have been really trying to get in touch with us en masse to try to establish services. And we have our own issues go going on, plus, at least my patient caseload is quite full for what my schedule allows.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
So I think so much of this crisis is that it's all happening at one time and we haven't had the infrastructure or the services or even the cultural I think acceptance that we needed help before.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think the second thing that's really important is that you've had someone that you've known who you trust and has been able to meet you multiple times and give you advice based on that knowledge of you and that history. And that is something that is increasingly difficult when, one, I'm receiving new patients who I'm just meeting who are in crisis. I'm not sure what their experience with crisis has been in the past. They've had a history of maybe getting through things in a way that I'm not sure. How do I know that you need medication in this moment?
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
We're seeing people for the first time putting into words what's going on with them and having to make these decisions about what's the best next thing for them to do in a situation like this with resources that are just woefully inadequate, which has been clear to so many people.
Farai Chidya:
I want to bring you in, Dr. Patel. So the World Health Organization said in the first year of the pandemic, anxiety and depression increased by 25% across the world, and that same study showed that young people are particularly affected. How are you seeing things manifest with younger patients and how are you meeting those needs?
Dr. Kavita Patel:
The way we're seeing it is in almost every aspect of medical care, keep in mind, by the time someone gets to the 15 minute visit with me or one of my colleagues, that's 0.01% of their entire experience. So we're just seeing a small glimpse of it, but we're seeing it in a lot of the things that we have to do what I call catch up. We've had so many people who have not had care, just for a variety of different reasons, for two years, going on maybe three in some cases, and we're seeing children who are behind in vaccinations, but more troubling, behind in milestones. I don't think the world understands the tsunami of despair and grief and stress that we're going to see for generations.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
We do these screening questions. We've got this kind of... I say we have the health system that we wanted kind of by design, like we've got the electronic computers and the this and the that and checked boxes, and I probably think the thing that I'm trying to learn how to do is I move all that stuff aside and I'm like, "I need you to tell me how you are, just how are you day-to-day?" And the most common question that I can ask all people is, "How often are you awake at night worrying about your family or about yourself," or fill in the blank, and almost to a person, 100% of them say, "I worry every single day." It's showing up in everything and it's in people who had COVID, didn't have COVID, know somebody who died of COVID. It's in all of us.
Farai Chidya:
Yeah, absolutely. And, Dr. Cyrus, back to you, how do you think about meeting this moment for kids and caregivers?
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think everything that Dr. Patel just mentioned is maybe the way that I think about it as well. It's naming that we've been in a marathon for two to three years at this point and that you are going to need time to recover. I think we're going about our day-to-day while all of these catastrophes are happening and not accounting for the fact that there has been stress on stress on stress everyday building. Plus, people were going through stress before pandemic.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
So when I'm talking to my patients or we're talking about the mental health of their children as well, I just try to remind them that there isn't just one reason that's accounting for this, that there are so many things that have happened that we haven't been naming.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
So I think what I've been trying to do is have folks realize that they're not going through this alone, that everyone is going through this, through this worldwide sort of experience right now while your details might look different from someone else and that you're not the only one who's going through it, which somehow is a bit reassuring, but that we need to find a way to come up with a language, come up with a process, come up with some sort of strategy that you and your family get through the day without it all feeling so crippling.
Farai Chidya:
We could go on about this topic for a long time, but I want to just get some quick responses. We interviewed molecular biologist and science educator Dr. Raven Baxter, known widely as Dr. Raven the Science Maven, and she's been chronicling her multi-month you long COVID.
Dr. Raven Baxter:
My initial infection period lasted about a week and a half, but then I would say that progressed into lingering symptoms that looked quite a lot different than what my initial infection was. And so the lingering symptoms were neurological issues, fatigue, immense fatigue, digestive issues, I had a total lack of appetite.
Farai Chidya:
For those dealing with long COVID, do you have any advice on how to seek the best medical care and how to do self-care and have other people care for you? A lot of times, people don't want to ask people to care for them, even when they really need it. I'll start with you, Dr. Cyrus.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
So I think the first thing is to take care of yourself. You know your body. You are the only one who knows your body no matter what someone else tells you. We don't know what you're feeling, we don't know what you're thinking. You know that better than anyone else.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think the world and our bodies are telling us, "Slow down," and that is okay. And it's not something we're accustomed to doing that we really have to honor right now.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think the second thing around asking for help, and this comes up so often in my practice, is, "Well, everyone's busy. They got their own thing. Why would I help?" And no one's asking each other for help and we're going through these processes separately, which is isolating. You can't do it alone.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
So I do think that what's the harm if you ask somebody for help? What's the worst thing that's going to happen? Ask yourself that and really answer that question. I think that's what we have to start doing, is really pushing ourselves to do things that we probably know are good for us, but are hard to do, like slow down and ask for help. This is a time when the consequences might actually be much, much worse if you don't start doing these things now.
Farai Chidya:
Yeah. And Dr. Patel, how do you think about these things?
Dr. Kavita Patel:
I'm going to be super checklisty, utilitarian about this because I've had so many patients now that I feel like have not been able to advocate for themselves.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
So number one, if you are even a hint of, "Maybe this is long COVID, maybe it's not," number one, ask your doctor if they have experience dealing with this. And if they kind of look at you and if the response is like, "No, not really," I know it's not easy, but try to find somebody or ask, "Do you have somebody that you can recommend that has seen cases of long COVID or works with one of the academic medical centers," like Dr. Cyrus. Hopkins has one. GW in the D.C. area. Unfortunately, they're all full.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
That brings me to number two. I think that so many people are being dismissed for their long COVID because they're dismissed as, "No, let's just put them on an antidepressant." That may be part of the treatment regimen, but some people are dismissing it like, "They're just depressed."
Dr. Kavita Patel:
So start writing things down because it's like everything, you don't know until you actually kind of chronicle it. Do it over even like a day and that'll help. And then number three, have someone who is with you in some of these visits. A lot of them are happening virtually. We sometimes hear what we want to hear, and then because of so much of the way long COVID is affecting our kind of processing and our brain functions, we don't retain all this information that you might hear in a 30 minute visit.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
So try to kind have people in your circle, in your corner, who you can tap in and say, "I need you to kind of come with me because, one, I'm scared, and two, I just need a little bit of help in case this is happening."
Farai Chidya:
Yeah. That's incredibly helpful. And you are listening to Sipping the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. I am Farai Chidya.
Farai Chidya:
This week, we're discussing the pandemic's impact on mental health and equity in healthcare with Dr. Kavita Patel, primary care physician and former Obama White House Health Policy Director, and Dr. Kali Cyrus, psychiatrist and activist in Washington, D.C.
Farai Chidya:
So I want to switch into talking about medical equity and healthcare disparities. We've been covering disparities in infant and maternal mortality over the life of this show. And just recently, there was a study of 1.8 million births in Florida which found that Black babies were twice as likely to survive when their doctor of record for infant care after the birth was Black.
Farai Chidya:
And of course the CDC has been tracking how Black women in the US are almost three times more likely to die from complications of childbirth than white women.
Farai Chidya:
So, Dr. Cyrus, let's approach this from the standpoint of birthing parents. If you're expecting and Black and you're reading studies like this, what can you do to have a dialogue with your providers?
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think the first thing you can do is if you read that article somewhere, you know that someone else wrote it, you can use that as a stepping stone to speak with your physician. I think some folks might be a little awkward about saying, "Well, I know that if I don't have a Black doctor, this thing might happen. I read this somewhere," but you can actually bring this in and say, "I'd like to talk more about this. This is something that I've been reading. I see it in the news. Can you help me understand what contributes to these types of outcomes?"
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Because, one, that will help you break the ice, help your physician, whoever's working with you know that you are aware of this information, that this is a topic you are bringing to them if they don't bring it to you. And they should be able to talk to you about it and come up with some solutions as to how they can reassure you that they're going to be understanding your process.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Just like a lot of the research on healthcare disparities and race concordance or identity concordance, there's something probably psychological or just having a shared experience that you're expecting a sense of safety and what you're going to have to do is try to create that with whoever you have access to and taking care of you. And if your doctor isn't keyed into this or cued into this, this is something you have to bring to the table.
Farai Chidya:
Yeah. And, Dr. Patel, pivoting over to kind of these adult questions of health equity, I personally recently had another situation where someone close to me experienced a negative health outcome because their doctor missed a really important chance to intervene earlier based on what should've been a pretty straightforward test result that just didn't get heeded.
Farai Chidya:
I say another because one of my best friends and my grandmother both died after failures of care. So this is very personal to me. Both of them and the first person I mentioned were all Black women. Let's approach this from the standpoints of doctor and patient. What can medical practices and even medical schools do to help doctors navigate health equity? You first, Dr. Patel.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
Yeah, I mean, A to Z. So for the first time in a long time, we've had finally more women of color graduating medical schools than ever in history. We've had always a bit more of a tilt in the last two decades of more women than men. We've also had kind of historic numbers of Black and Brown women specifically graduating. So it just helps to walk into a room and have somebody who looks like you. Even if that's a doctor that you may not ultimately connect with, that's okay, but it helps.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
And I think in terms of equity, teaching equity I find is one of those check boxes things. Like, yes, we have a curriculum on equity, inequity is what we live, it's what we experience.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
So I do think that one of the most humbling things, especially for my male counterparts, myself, because obviously I would be lying if I said I understand the experience of a Black woman, is to actually kind of walk a mile in their shoes. And that is something that I would advocate not just medical schools, nursing schools, dental, any health professional to actually take from real patients who are going through, Farai, what your family has gone through and actually go through and then take on the role of the patient.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
So for example, if you know that you've seen a patient's chart and they had had a abnormal test result, an abnormal blood sugar for days and many doctors and many pharmacists and nurses missed it, you take on the role of the patient and ask, "What was it that I could have done? Why did this happen to me?" and then it starts to actually put equity in the lens of these are people, these are incredible outcomes, devastation.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
But then the third point I just want to make, Farai, is that we have to be willing to say we made a mistake. My most popular phrase is, "I don't know, I will try to find the answer." I think our society needs to be more accepting of that. I don't think equity will ever be this kind of one solution, or one approach will create equity, but we'll just keep chipping away at the inequities that we've structurally put in place in healthcare.
Farai Chidya:
And Dr. Cyrus, how do you view this from provider's side? How do you view this as a system where you've got medical providers, you've got patients, a lot of stress, fast deadlines, endless tests?
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
It's a system. If we're thinking about disparities and inequity and what we can do, there are different layers of intervention. So there's a systemic layer, there's us as humans and individuals, doctors who are interacting with patients. There's a community level. I think at the end of the day, it all goes down to money. We need more funding in our system to hire more nurses, to hire more physicians. That's what we ultimately need at the end of the day.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
I think as it pertains to the doctor-patient, this is something I've been quite passionate about as a medical educator who specializes in coming up with diversity education. It's really hard to talk about this stuff. We usually, like Dr. Patel said, check a box on having the course, but we have to do more than that. You have to really have the conversation, because if you think about physicians and folks who are medical providers, what is our lens? Rarely is there someone else who's a Black queen androgynous presenting woman like myself in a room with other doctors. The way that I see the world is very different from other people.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
And so how do you put aside the assumptions that you knee-jerk make, a lot of the biases, but even the ones that are in their favor, and not just assume, but you have to actually see it from their perspective and take it from the nitty gritty of really asking them where they're coming from and what they're doing.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
One underused approach is a standardized patient program. So my former hat, I was in charge of the actors who posed patients and created really out of the box scenarios that medical students have to sit down with an actor who presents with a situation that's-
Farai Chidya:
Oh wow.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Not your typical, "I'm just here with diabetes," but maybe, "I'm also queer," or, "I'm trans," or, "I don't speak English." And you have to go through the experience of trying to interview and speak with this patient.
Farai Chidya:
Well, we're going to have to leave it there for time, but I want to thank you both for bringing your compassion and your wisdom to us and to everyone listening because we got to take care of ourselves. It's a marathon, not a sprint, folks. So thank you Dr. Cyrus.
Dr. Kali Cyrus:
Thanks for having me.
Farai Chidya:
And thank you, Dr. Patel.
Dr. Kavita Patel:
Thank you.
Farai Chidya:
We were speaking with Dr. Kavita Patel, primary care physician and former Obama White House Health Policy Director, and Dr. Kali Cyrus, psychiatrist and activist in Washington, D.C.
Farai Chidya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chidya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Jonathan Blakely. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly is our producer. Our associate producer is Natyna Bean.
Farai Chidya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Steve Lack and Lauren Schild. And engineered by Mike Goehler.
Farai Chidya:
And a big thank you to Tonya Mosley, host and creator of the podcast Truth Be Told and her team: Ayanna Angel, Aisha Brown, James T. Green and Enrico Benjamin. Truth be Told is a production of TMI Productions in association with Fearless Media.
Farai Chidya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.