Cooper on COVID-19, Kids, and ‘Emotional Poisoning’: Time

Professor Tom Cooper was quoted in a Time magazine article about the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on kids’ mental health. He told Time that he sees parallels between the wall-to-wall media coverage of the coronavirus and the nonstop media images of 9/11.

“During 9/11, we found that the prime-time coverage of airplanes flying into World Trade Center buildings with people jumping out of windows led to something that you might call emotional poisoning,” [Cooper] says. “People saw it again and again and again and again, and there was a kind of totally demoralizing effect. When you hear about COVID-19 again and again and again and again, all of that leads to a kind of emotional poisoning too.”

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