As families, communities and nations navigate the physical, emotional, social and financial challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to share my thoughts as a sociologist who studies social responses to adversity.

A number of years ago I compared notes with a colleague who was carrying out fieldwork parallel to my own among women diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, I lived and worked in Israel; my colleague lived and worked in North Carolina. Both of us asked women to tell us about their experiences with illness and treatment. Though there were some similarities, I found that the Israeli women tended to emphasize interactions and relationships with medical personnel and with family members. The North Carolina women, in contrast, emphasized their own internal experiences, offering comments such as: “I wouldn’t want to wish this on anyone, but the truth is that going through breast cancer has made me a better person. Now I understand what’s truly important.”

The North Carolina women were, consciously or unconsciously, drawing upon Christian ideas regarding suffering: that affliction leads to salvation, that pain on earth leads to rewards in heaven, that adversity is a moral challenge. Those beliefs likely helped some of them find consolation in their present circumstances. Looking back, however, I wonder if others suffered two-fold: from cancer and from personal anguish or community disdain for failing to live up to rarely questioned moral ideals.

Sociologists Pedro Estêvão, Alexandre Calado and Luís Capucha propose the term “heroic resilience” to describe interpretations of adversities as potentially positive turning points for those who are smart enough or strong enough or good enough to seize the opportunity. The flip side, however, is that same ideal may serve to denigrate those who cannot live up to the standards of heroic resilience.

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Indeed, there is evidence that self-perceived growth (or perhaps declarations of self-perceived growth) following tragedy may actually be associated with poorer adjustment down the line. For example, a study of soldiers deployed to Iraq found that perceived personal growth five months post-deployment was associated with more post-traumatic stress symptoms fifteen months post-deployment. The authors conclude that, it may in fact be “counterproductive to promote perceived growth to enhance adjustment after traumatic events.”

More broadly, when resilience is framed as a personal or psychological attribute, we ignore the social and environmental conditions that allow some individuals to avoid the harmful consequences of adverse events and that force others into further adverse situations. Research into poly-victimization and complex trauma acknowledges the absurdity of expecting that people who live with repeated, ongoing or multiple forms of adversity can “overcome” their distress through therapeutic interventions alone. From a sociological perspective, responses to adversity always are driven both by cultural ideals and by social and financial resources that are available in specific situations: Funds to stock up on food; safe places to live; support from people we trust. Put differently, both adversity and resilience are always social matters.

Taking a macro view, it seems to me that the supposed moral / psychological value of adversity has been used historically to keep poor people, slaves, serfs and women from rebelling against injustices. Today, “heroic resilience” continues to be promoted as an inexpensive alternative to government and communal responsibilities for dealing with poverty, racism and inequality.

In this era of COVID-19, models of resilience certainly can be a source of encouragement for some people, especially in managing the challenges of social distancing. But we must be cautious not to allow ideals of “heroic resilience” to be used as a stick to beat people who do not or cannot meet cultural expectations of self-sufficiency or “getting over” tragedies. And we must be vigilant to make sure that rhetoric of growth through suffering does not become a smokescreen for the failure of government to provide services and protect human rights.