Individual Stress-Coping amid/after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Role of Civic Engagement and Stress-Management Interventions

In the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically struck and reshaped the world. The unprecedented pandemic and pandemic management practices (e.g., social distancing, travel restrictions, lockdowns, etc.) make discernible different types of stress to the affected individuals and communities, and drive people to think about the sources of such stress and the coping strategies. The pandemic is managed by governments and societies at different locales in diverse manners and affects communities in uneven ways. Thus, the way people encounter, express and cope with their stresses amid/after the pandemic is highly heterogenous and contextualized, resulting from the complex, dialogic processes where they embrace, resist, and rework different elements of local socio-political and cultural ecologies and interactions with other community members. This study attempts to unravel such complexity and dynamics in the setting of Shanghai, which was among the Chinese cities that were most severely struck by the pandemic and witnessed citizens’ active expression of their traumatized experience amid the pandemic. Using “narrative experience” as a central methodological and epistemological device, this study explores how people cope with the post-traumatic stress amid/after the pandemic and reflects on the complex imbrication and entanglement of people’s inner psyche mental sphere and the outer socio-political environment. It pays particular attention to 1) the social and political ramifications of post-traumatic stress and stress-coping processes; 2) the relationship between stress-coping and civic engagement; and 3) the effects and limits of stress management interventions.