Former first lady Michelle Obama has recently talked about her struggles of battling low-grade depression due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Encouraging people to come forward and talk about their struggle, Obama said in an interview with People Magazine, “Depression is understandable in these circumstances, during these times.”

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“To think that somehow that we can just continue to rise above all the shock and the trauma and the upheaval that we have been experiencing without feeling it in that way is just unrealistic,” she said further.   

According to a CDC survey conducted in August 2020, approximately 41% of people reported mental health problems stemmed from the pandemic, reported CNN. 

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She said, “These have been challenging times. Many people have struggled: jobs lost, people going hungry. We’ve learned to count our blessings, the importance of health and family.”

A mental health crisis is in the making in the US with one in three Americans reporting that they have experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

Michelle first revealed her struggles with “low-grade depression” in her podcast last summer when the health crisis was at its peak. 

She said she “needed to acknowledge what I was going through, because a lot of times we feel like we have to cover that part of ourselves up, that we always have to rise above and look as if we’re not paddling hard underneath the water.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization General, said in a conference, “After the Second World War, the world has experienced mass trauma because Second World War affected many, many lives. And now, even with this Covid pandemic, with bigger magnitude, more lives have been affected. Almost the whole world is affected, each and every individual on the surface of the world actually has been affected.”

“And that means mass trauma, which is beyond proportion, even bigger than what the world experienced after the Second World War. And when there is mass trauma, it affects communities for many years to come,” he added. 

Talking about the negative impact George Floyd’s murder video had on her, Obama said, “We had the continued killing of Black men at the hands of police. Just seeing the video of George Floyd, experiencing that eight minutes. That’s a lot to take on, not to mention being in the middle of a quarantine.”