HEALTHCARE HEROES: ARCHETYPE AND FOLKLORE
Esoteric Folklore
“Heroes work here,” the signs say. “You’re the real heroes,” messages to the NHS read. And yet, real harm may have been caused to the people who were painted as heroes by the media. Within the healthcare community, rates of mental health crises increased and systemic issues already present were amplified (Chen). In response to these traumas, healthcare workers have taken to social media with digital material folklore.
In a trend on TikTok during the Omicron surge, nurses and other healthcare workers would post images of their burnout and breakdowns to a popular sound called “Mr. Forgettable.” In one video, the user @kaitlyn.justice showed images of her crying and screenshots of text messages where she lamented that she did not have the energy to do anything. There is a real mental toll placed upon healthcare workers and they, sadly, do not have the resources that they need.
7 PM Clap
In the 2020 article “What the Chaos in Hospitals Is Doing to Doctors,” Jordan Kisner collected the reactions of some healthcare workers to the 7 p.m. clap. The chief of medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical Center, Joseph Fins, is quoted as saying, “‘That applause,’ Fins said, visibly squirming. ‘It was, in a sense, mortifying. Nobody liked it. None of us felt we deserved it’” (Kisner 2020).
Fins then goes on to remark that the public needed to see healthcare workers as heroes in order to justify placing undue burdens on them. Exoterically, it was a way for the public to come together and to displace the burdens of the pandemic. Esoterically, it was yet another form of mental and moral anguish unduly placed on healthcare workers and another source of strife.
In a personal interview my classmate Benjamin Johnson performed, his mom, a nurse, said, “And despite being hailed as a hero you felt inadequate. And it became clear that it just wasn't going to be possible to be the nurse that I was prior to the pandemic” (Johnson, 2022). She described the effect of this narrative as one of grief. There is a poignant moment where she talks about going from being seen as heroes to being abused.
Later during the pandemic with the introduction of vaccines, the burdens shifted from the healthcare workers to the public. In his article, “The Toxic Healthcare Hero Narrative,” Nurse Practitioner Leon Chen expressed a similar sentiment and brought up a line from “The Dark Knight.” Once hailed as heroes, now healthcare workers are seen as villains by many.
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What is a Folk Hero?
