How can we effectively deliver bad news at the society level?
Where I live, in Ontario, Canada, this past week has been filled with uncertainty and headlines surrounding new local COVID-19 public health measures.
Reactions were mixed, but overall, a mist of fatigue and anxiety seemed to cast over our communities, widely expressed through various social media platforms.
In my own experience, I found out about the new public health measures through Canadian news outlets on Instagram. I was the one who relayed this information to my household members, and they each began to share it with their networks. Throughout all of these points of interaction, the delivery of the message was coupled with emotions that were affecting us. The way the Instagram post was worded affected how I perceived the situation. In the same way, my worried tone when sharing the news affected how others in my family received it.
Adapting to new public health measures is a shared experience that a lot of us are currently going through. We each were given different pieces of information at different timepoints, in distinct tones and formats. And yet, many of us are experiencing the same emotions. This makes me think about how framing and delivery of a piece of information (in this case, a pretty consequential one) affects the range of emotions we feel and how it impacts our reaction.
In the traditional context of healthcare, there can be a lot at stake when delivering good or bad news to patients. Could the same principles be applied to distributing public health information? How can a one-on-one conversation be scaled up to the level of society, while maintaining its core principles of integrity and empathy?
When delivering bad news, we are told to consider the mental state of the receiving party. Are they ready to hear this information? How might they react? Is there any support available for them afterwards? Maybe we can start thinking about how this framework can be applied at a larger scale. Could there be a personalized text message that gets sent to everyone explaining the situation? (keeping in mind the paradox of being “personalized” and getting “sent to everyone”). Could people have access to a hotline where they could ask questions about the new changes, or simply vent about how hard life is?
I am writing this in light of the gravity of the situation we are in, remembering the unbelievable strain this is having on our healthcare systems and communities across the world. The emotional aspect of coping with an ever-changing sequence of events and regulations can seriously take a toll on individuals’ mental, physical and socioeconomic health. I wanted to share my observations from this week’s experience with the hopes of contributing to larger discussions around mental health promotion, effective information design, community building, and considering psychological state as an important factor in how we receive, share, and react to stressful news.
