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It’s Time to Heal, Minnesota

Dealing with societal trauma

BY Marcus Schmit  

The term "societal trauma" describes what happens when events are large enough, disruptive enough, or frightening enough to affect not just individuals but entire communities. Unlike a personal crisis — a job loss, a health diagnosis, a family rupture — societal trauma lands on everyone at once. It disrupts the sense of safety that most people carry through daily life without thinking about it. And because it affects so many people simultaneously, the usual support systems — family, community and neighbors — are often stressed at the same moment they are most needed.

What makes societal trauma particularly challenging is that reactions vary widely and may not show up right away. Some people feel the impact immediately, in the form of anxiety, sleeplessness or difficulty concentrating. Others seem fine in the short term and only begin to struggle months later, when the immediate crisis has faded from public view but its weight has not lifted. Still others manage reasonably well on their own but are supporting partners, children, parents or patients who are not. There is no single right way to respond to collective hardship, which makes it easy for people to assume that because they are functioning, they are fine — and to miss the signs that something more complicated is happening beneath the surface.

Healing from trauma rarely happens on its own or all at once.

One category of impact deserves special attention: what happens to children. Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has established over decades that traumatic events in early life can affect health and well-being long into adulthood, raising the risk of depression, anxiety, substance use and physical health problems. Children who lived through the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, or who watched news coverage of violence and civil unrest, or whose families were torn apart by immigration enforcement are carrying experiences that may not surface clinically for years. Supporting children's mental health now is an investment in outcomes that extend across a lifetime — and it requires understanding the context in which those children have been growing up.

Minnesota Needs a Break

To understand why healing is needed, it helps to simply name the sequence of events Minnesotans have navigated.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020 and brought with it, illness and death but prolonged isolation, grief, economic disruption and the psychological burden of sustained uncertainty. Long after the acute phase of the pandemic ended, its effects continued. Communities were still navigating disruptions in relationships, routines and trust — in institutions, in each other and in the future — when the next wave arrived.

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sent ripples across the country, but the epicenter was here. Minnesota experienced some of the largest increases in anger, sadness and anxiety documented anywhere in the nation in the weeks following Floyd's death. The unrest that followed raised hard questions about public safety, race and justice that communities are still working through. For many Minnesotans — particularly Black Minnesotans — this was not a single event but a reckoning with the experience of accumulated harm that long preceded 2020.

In the years that followed came a sustained surge in violent crime in the Twin Cities metro, economic uncertainty, a tragic school shooting and a political assassination that left many Minnesotans feeling that the ground beneath them was less stable than it had been. Then, beginning in December 2025, Operation Metro Surge brought more than 3,000 federal immigration officers into the Twin Cities, with arrests exceeding 100 people per day at the peak of the operation. Three people died in connection with the operation. Families were separated. Children lost parents. Entire communities — immigrant and non-immigrant alike — lived in a state of fear and grief that no community can absorb without consequence. For many Minnesotans, proposed Medicaid cuts have added financial anxiety to an already heavy emotional load — threatening access to the very services that support recovery.

At NAMI Minnesota we saw the consequences in real time. During the peak of Operation Metro Surge, calls to our helpline increased by 120% and our social media engagement skyrocketed. The number of people reaching out in the grip of suicidal thoughts rose sharply. We knew of teenagers who attempted to take their own lives after their parents were detained. I described then what we were witnessing as "collective trauma and collective grief" — and that is exactly what it was. The surge in calls and clicks was not just a data point. It was a signal: communities were hurting in ways that demanded an organized, sustained and compassionate response.

That signal was not surprising to anyone who works in mental health. What was striking was the scale and the speed. It confirmed what the research has long shown — that large-scale traumatic events create population-level mental health needs — and it made clear that whatever response we mounted could not be a short-term fix. Recovery from this kind of accumulated disruption takes time. It takes resources. And it takes a commitment to staying present long after the news cycle has moved on.

An Appropriate Response

This summer, NAMI Minnesota launched Healing Minnesota: Recovery Now, Mental Health Always. The initiative is our organized answer to everything described above — and a commitment to the long road of recovery that lies ahead.

The initiative brings together community organizations, mental health providers, educators, faith leaders, philanthropic partners and public institutions around a shared purpose: making sure Minnesotans have what they need to heal and that mental health stays at the center of the public conversation long after the headlines fade. The Medica Foundation is among the primary sources of funding for the effort. We are grateful for their partnership and for their recognition that the work of recovery requires sustained investment, not one-time attention.

The core activities of Healing Minnesota span several areas. Community conversations and healing events are being organized across the state, designed to give people a space to share what they have experienced and to feel less alone. Multilingual educational materials are in development to reach communities in the languages they speak and through the cultural frameworks that shape how they understand mental health and help-seeking. Funds are available to help fill gaps for organizations providing mental health support in their communities. And a statewide report is being prepared, informed by interviews with community leaders, service providers, advocates and people directly affected that will document the mental health impact of recent events and generate recommendations for policymakers, health systems and community organizations.

How success will be measured is a question we take seriously. We are tracking reach: how many people participate in community events, how many download or engage with educational materials and how many connect with services they did not know about before. We are asking whether awareness and help-seeking behavior changes over time. And we are paying close attention to whether this initiative shifts the longer-term policy and funding landscape for mental health in Minnesota — because lasting recovery requires systems that are built to support it, not just programs that address immediate need.

Engaging People Where They Are

One of the things we have learned over years of doing this work is that mental health support lands differently depending on who is offering it, through what relationships and in what language — literal and cultural. A program designed without input from the communities it is meant to serve will reach some people and miss many others.

Abe Gebeyeheu, EdD, a culturally specific school-based mental health therapist and NAMI Minnesota partner in the initiative, puts it plainly: "Mental health services are most effective when grounded in culture, faith, language, family values and the community's lived experiences. Care must be built on trust and shaped by community voice, recognizing that healing is not only an individual process but also a collective one."

That means our coalition-building strategy is not just about convening organizations — it is about recruiting trusted voices within specific communities: faith leaders, cultural liaisons, community elders and others whose credibility is relational, not institutional. When someone who is already trusted in a community says, "This is real, and here is where you can get support," the message carries weight that an institutional campaign cannot replicate on its own.

Large-scale traumatic events create population-level mental health needs.

It also means being honest about the differences in what communities need. The experience of Operation Metro Surge in immigrant communities — the fear, the family separation, the uncertainty about what might happen next — is distinct from, though connected to, the experience of a rural Minnesotan who watched the same events unfold on a screen and felt unsettled in ways they may not have words for. Both are real. Both matter. And both require approaches tailored to their specific context.

Healing from trauma rarely happens on its own or all at once. What helps most: staying connected to others rather than withdrawing, maintaining routines that provide a sense of stability and limiting news and social media when it feeds anxiety more than it informs. For those experiencing more persistent symptoms — sleeplessness, intrusive thoughts, emotional numbness or constant unease — professional support makes a real difference and seeking it is a sign of self-awareness, not weakness. Children benefit from honest, age-appropriate conversations, reassurance and consistency in daily routines. None of this requires a diagnosis or a referral. It is where recovery begins.

Healing Is About All of Us

The most stubborn obstacle in any mental health initiative is not lack of resources or lack of programs. It is the deeply human tendency to believe that mental health struggles are something that happen to other people and to believe that seeking help is a sign of weakness rather than courage.

Minnesota’s humility, resilience and self-sufficiency serve us well in many circumstances. But it can work against recognition of genuine need. Those who have functioned through COVID, through the George Floyd protests, through years of community upheaval, through the fear of Operation Metro Surge — people who kept showing up to work, kept caring for their families, kept doing what was required — may not think of themselves as someone who needs support. The data suggest otherwise.

Our rollout strategy begins with individuals and organizations already engaged with mental health, already willing to be champions. We are building outward from there, using the networks those trusted partners bring with them to reach people who have not previously seen NAMI Minnesota as an organization that speaks to their experience or their community's experience.

That expansion of our reach is itself part of what Healing Minnesota is about. NAMI Minnesota has historically been most visible to individuals and families navigating serious mental illness — and we will always be there for them. This initiative is a signal that our mission extends to every Minnesotan navigating the mental health effects of living through difficult times. The invitation is open to everyone.

What Physicians Can Do

Minnesota's physicians are in a unique position in relation to this initiative — and in relation to the broader challenge it addresses. You see the effects of societal trauma in your exam rooms, often without patients naming it. Fatigue that does not have a clear physiological explanation, or anxiety that has intensified over the past several years. Sleep disruption, irritability, difficulty concentrating. The patient whose physical complaint is real, but whose underlying distress is something harder to diagnose.

Physicians are also part of the community that has been through what their patients have been through. The past several years have been hard on everyone in health care — and the professional norm of projecting competence and steadiness can make it difficult to acknowledge that personally. The people who care for everyone else need care too.

Healing Minnesota invites physicians to engage at three levels.

The first is personal. Consider your own mental health as something worth attending to — not as a professional risk, but as a human need. The same conversation you would have with a patient who described years of accumulated stress is a conversation worth having with yourself, or with a trusted colleague or with a professional who can help.

The second is in your practice. The staff who work alongside you — medical assistants, nurses, front desk personnel, administrators — all are members of the same community, carrying the same weight. Creating space to acknowledge that, connecting people to resources and modeling the willingness to seek help when needed can shift the culture of a workplace in ways that matter.

The third is with your patients. A single question probing the affects these traumatic events have made them feel can open a door that patients are waiting for someone to open. NAMI Minnesota's helpline, support groups and educational materials are free, accessible and designed to be a welcoming first step for people who are not sure where else to turn.

Recovery Is Possible

Minnesota has been through a lot. But that is not where the story ends. Across this state, every day, people are reaching out for help and finding it. Communities are coming back together. Families are rebuilding. Organizations that were stretched beyond capacity are finding partners and resources they did not have before. The dramatic increase in calls to our helpline and engagement with our social media during Operation Metro Surge was alarming — and it was also a sign that people knew where to turn, that they reached out rather than suffering alone and that we were there to answer.

Healing Minnesota is built on the conviction that recovery is not just possible — it is already happening, and it will go further and reach more people with coordinated effort, sustained commitment and the involvement of trusted voices across every sector of Minnesota life.

The medical community is one of those voices. When physicians say to their patients, staff and colleagues that what they are carrying is real and help is available — it matters. It reduces stigma. It opens doors. It changes outcomes.

We have seen what Minnesotans can do when we face something hard together. We showed the world how to respond to a series of traumatic events. Now, with your help, let’s show the world how we recover.

Marcus Schmit is  the Executive Director of NAMI Minnesota, where he has led the organization since November 2025.