Is there a word

for the opposite of a miracle? There must be a sound.

–C.T. Salazar

Sometimes acclaimed poet C.T. Salazar of Columbus marvels, “Oh, good Lord, what a great life I have.”

But ever since February, when the first stirrings of the coronavirus pandemic became public knowledge, Salazar has had to make a conscious choice every morning whether to live his life or take it.

what worse

a tiger or an empty

tiger cage

“The pandemic has done the work of clarifying and amplifying the difficulties our nation is facing,” Salazar said. “It’s just making it very easy to think about it on a daily basis.”

The Mississippi Department of Mental Health  recorded a 30% increase in demand for crisis interventions in March and April – an increase from 4,905 during those months in 2019 to 6,344 this year, according to Adam Moore communications director at the department. The numbers dropped back to pre-pandemic levels in May and June 2020.

The National Suicide Prevention Line in Jackson, the Mississippi agency for handling calls to its 1-800-273-TALK hotline, also has seen a steady increase since March 2020 – from a combined 1,694 calls in March through May 2019 to 1,799 in the same period this year.

“You can see the pattern,” said Brenda Patterson, executive director of the Jackson line. “In looking at the length of calls, you can see the length of call for May of 2019 was 549 minutes and 627 minutes for May of 2020. … while it does not look drastic from the outside looking in, it is a steady increase with no tapering off and more over the length of calls are increasing and the intensity, which is hard to measure currently, is increasing as well.”

The trend has continued through the summer, Patterson said, with August 2020 marking 709 calls to the crisis line for the month.

Salazar’s professional achievements have not made him immune to the psychological and emotional stress caused by the pandemic.

A 2020 winner of the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award in Poetry for his first book “This Might Have Meant Fire,” Salazar has a chapbook of poems, “Forty Stitches Sewing a Body Against a Ramshackle Night” (released Sept. 15 by Animal Heart Press), and a minicollection called “American Cavewall Sonnet”. He works as senior librarian at Columbus Air Force Base and is two semesters away from earning an MA in Library and Information Sciences at University of Southern Mississippi.

The 28-year-old has suffered with depression before, one of the last times after he finished his MFA in creative writing at the Mississippi University for Women in December 2018. His family tree is littered with suicides, so he has always grown up with the thought that suicide was always an option to take if the pressure got too intense.

But the pandemic has made him sit down and examine his reasons for living or dying more intently. “It’s in the quiet moments like when taking a shower or when I get to work early and no one else is here that no matter what you see or what you read that your spot on the planet is valuable,” Salazar said.

made a boat

with my hands to hold

water

Mental health professionals are seeing more and more cases such as Salazar’s, where people just building their lives and careers are overwhelmed with uncertainty, resulting in epidemic levels of anxiety and depression and other mental conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“In the U.S., the national rate of anxiety tripled in the second quarter compared to the same period in 2019 (from 8.1% to 25.5%), and depression almost quadrupled (from 6.5% to 24.3%). In Britain, which has also had a severe outbreak and a long lockdown, depression has roughly doubled, from 9.7% of adults before the pandemic to 19.7% in June,” according to a Aug. 22, 2020, report in Bloomberg Opinion.

In the latest study to suggest an uptick, half of U.S. adults surveyed reported at least some signs of depression, such as hopelessness, feeling like a failure or getting little pleasure from doing things. That’s double the rate from a different survey two years ago, Boston University researchers said Sept. 2 in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.

Salazar doesn’t take medication or have a counselor, though he says he certainly could use one. He doesn’t have any answers for what could be done for people such as him but did have this to say:

“I don’t have a solution but I think as a people we could agree that we’re suffering from a trauma that’s not in the textbooks. But that would require us to be more vulnerable to each other. It asks us to be aware and working with the people around us that we somehow don’t know, even in our neighborhoods.”

most of us

are born with a stranger’s

face

This report was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to inform, educate and empower Mississippians in their communities through the use of investigative journalism. Sign up for our newsletter. Email Julie Whitehead at julie.whitehead.mcir@gmail.com.