Re-ignition: Rise of a New Trauma Cycle in Minnesota

As a clinical psychotherapist and licensed addictions counselor I regularly encounter individuals experiencing various physiological and psychological impacts of trauma, anxiety, depression, delusions, psychosis, and abuse of substances. The tuned diagnostic lens I’ve developed and used daily to treat my clients’ mental health and substance use disorder issues is usually pretty sharp. Given my previous background working in the political communications, issues activism and organizing spaces for more than 20 years prior to becoming a clinician, I still retain that gut-level in-the-trenches instinct for observing mass movements, mass psychology, and group dynamics in real time. Once one has earned their stripes as an organizer and operative, they no longer are able to 'not see’ the silent hidden moves happening backstage, behind the curtain, embedded programmed messaging, the psyops happening in front of them during an action. Over the past week in the Twin Cities what has been observed is truly, deeply, crushingly disturbing.

What we are witnessing is the beginning of a trauma cycle. If you know you know (IYKYK).

When propaganda, psychological operations, and psychological programming spill out into media, infect group behaviors, and influence individual actions, it is quite easy to tie it back to forms of psychological diagnostic criteria that particular individuals might be experiencing. What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis/Saint Paul, like Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Washington, DC, before us, is nothing short of mass psychological terrorism, intended to instill fear, distrust, and mass trauma upon the population.

Beginning in late 2019 and into 2020, the Covid-19 Pandemic caused mass populations in the U.S. and the world to experience sustained life disruption, isolation, anxiety, depression, panic, substance abuse, grief and loss of loved ones. In Spring of 2020 George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin while fellow officers stood by, Floyd dying of intentional asphyxiation with Chauvin’s leg and boot on his neck. Angry residents and outside agitators filled with rage started days of riots, committed arsons, looting, inflicting wide-scale devastation across Minneapolis and Saint Paul neighborhoods. For years following, and even to today, South Minneapolis and Uptown communities are still rebuilding from the block-to-block devastation.

These events were followed by a tumultuous public reckoning surrounding the true history of police brutality, racism, corruption, and unjust prosecution and incarceration in our cities. We lost almost half of our police officers and many of our dedicated corps of first responders from either medical leave accredited to post-traumatic stress disorder, forced retirement under corruption, or pure exhaustion. Minneapolis was forced into agreeing to consent decrees with the state and federal governments in order to clean up our law enforcement systems. Police departments still are struggling to rebuild trust and replenish their ranks to protect the citizenry.

Occurring parallel to these events, like most communities in America, a combined fentanyl and methamphetamine abuse epidemic killed or permanently maimed a significant portion of our population, especially young people who experienced disruption during Covid and had witnessed the riots. Homelessness became worse than ever, encampments were widespread, and many people died needlessly. Still, community leaders, new police leaders and elected officials, clergy, and non-profit organizations stepped-up to work together to heal our city as best they could in light of the wide-scale

Over the preceding five years mental health and addiction clinicians have seen a massive uptick in people seeking help after experiencing wave after wave of individual and mass psychological trauma. Sadly, due to Trump Administration and MAGA GOP’s gutting of Medicaid, access to affordable health insurance with MH/SUD coverage, food and housing assistance, combined with corporate greed driving up costs for all Americans, many individuals in need will be unable to afford quality mental health care and substance use treatment. Education funding via government grants to pay for training new clinicians and health care workers is decimated as well, and student loan debt is crippling existing MH/SUD clinicians and support workers to such an extent that many are being forced out of the industry, taking other jobs just to be able to afford to live. Reimbursement rates for provided MH/SUD care are roughly half the amount per visit in the U.S. compared to other first-world industrialized countries with nationalized health care. Health insurance companies continue to systematically deny legitimate claims for delivered MH/SUD treatment in order to protect shareholder dividends and CEO bonus pay.

To add insult to injury the co-occurring MH/SUD treatment system in Minnesota is reeling from the closure of many larger treatment programs due to fraud and over-billing scandals, committed by profiteer treatment center CEOs, owners, and shady investors, in almost all cases they are white U.S. citizens. A massive Covid-era food and housing fraud investigation resulted in the discovery that millions of dollars in aid was stolen, money that was supposed to help needy children. Although many foreign-born individuals plead guilty, were prosecuted and convicted for participating in the schemes, in fact, the convicted ringleaders of this fraud were white U.S. citizens.

Subsidized housing program funds for people in early recovery have been eliminated, putting thousands of at-risk people trying to access co-occurring MH/SUD treatment in the position of having no place to live and no ability to get a job to pay for stable housing while they are going to treatment. Care services for developmentally disabled and people who are qualified with a medical or mental health disability have been frozen out, leaving people without funding for group homes or transportation. The result is, more addiction, more mental health crises, more homelessness. Still, local organizations, state stakeholders, and non-profit treatment providers are doing their best to fill the need using every available mechanism to help the most vulnerable among us.

Now, just as the Twin Cities is starting to rebound from the shock of these multiple hits, agents of the U.S. Government who landed in Minneapolis over the past few days are going door-to-door without signed judicial warrants, busting down front doors to take people from homes, snatching and disappearing individuals off the street, tackling and beating people in grocery stores, pharmacies, school steps, and sidewalks. No site is off limits, no action is unsanctioned; including murdering a mom in her minivan in broad daylight who happened to be exercising her Constitutionally-protected First Amendment guaranteed right to document law enforcement activities.

The ICE/CBP/DHS Gestapo is creating mass psychological damage through a domestic paramilitary campaign of rage, hatred, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and calculated terror. Christian Nationalist extremists, some former U.S. military, Proud Boys, One Percenters, Army of God, Klu Klux Klan, and other militia members, many suspected to be previously convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol and pardoned by Donald Trump; were hired by ICE/CBP/DHS specifically for loyalty to MAGA and hatred of immigrants, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, women — anyone who is not a white male Christian Nationalist.

Sent by Donald Trump, Steven Miller, Kristi Noem, Cory Lewandowski; led by CBP Sector Chief Greg Bovino, powered by huge signing bonuses and $100K+ salaries, geared-up and armed to the teeth like a special operations squad thanks to the largest single funding surge for any paramilitary organization in U.S. history — they aim to execute their dear leader’s fever dream of ethnic and social cleansing on the streets of the Twin Cities as a testbed for doing it across the United States. Not ironically they are using techniques developed by the U.S. Army and other branches of the U.S. Government while fighting fascist Nazis in World War II. This time, however, they are using the techniques on U.S. Citizens and residents, inside the country, on U.S. soil. This is the nightmare scenario we were warned about. It is happening now.

Mental health and substance use clinicians in the Twin Cities already are beginning to see impacts of new street level trauma events show up in the therapy space, and we are preparing for a tsunami of new trauma-linked mental health cases that will present as a result. This is a perfect storm of lack of capacity, massive need, and fewer clinicians to deliver high quality, evidence based, trauma informed, co-occurring, culturally aware MH/SUD services; exacerbated by another mass casualty, mass trauma, mass psychosis-inducing event.

It didn’t have to be this way.