Caitlin Tan, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Mental Health Counselor Discusses One Year Of Pandemic

The world is one-year into the COVID-19 pandemic. It has taken a toll on mental health, as four in 10 adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorders in 2020, up from one in 10 in 2019, according to a U.S. Census survey.

Our Inside Appalachia co-host Caitlin Tan interviewed Carol Smith, a professor of counseling at Marshall University. Smith said that this past year has been tough on a lot of people — regardless of major tragedy or not.

***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

Carol Smith: It’s completely normal to feel fried, bored, burned out. You know, feeling antsy, all of those things. Yeah, they’re all completely completely normal. Sit with the feeling. What is it telling you? What is it telling you about your situation? And if you want to, you can create some sort of ritual that expresses that sense of yearning or longing. And go ahead and indulge that for a few minutes, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time indulging that because that can just make you sadder. I would spend time just saying okay, “Yep, we all feel burned out. Guess what? Everybody does. This situation is difficult. We’re gonna keep pressing forward.”

Caitlin Tan: And do you think it’s an important time to reserve judgment and be less critical of oneself and perhaps others? As we’re all just kind of doing the best we can right now.

Smith: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I even say this to myself, sometimes. Just, you know, be gentle with yourself. It’s okay.

Tan: And do you think once our world does return to more of a sense of normalcy — like the majority of people are vaccinated and things are opened back up — there could still be some carryover of mental health issues that we suffered from?

Smith: Things are not going to automatically go away, because some things changed, irrevocably, during COVID-19. People have had loved ones die. People have lost their jobs or even their careers. People have been made homeless. There have been an awful lot of losses. And we’ve had to stay really cooped up for a really long time. Difficult situations have become more difficult.

I think we will do our best when we dig down into our mountaineer roots. I know that we’re all doing the best we can — we pull together and we’re compassionate towards one another. If we just give each other just a little more margin, a little more breathing space, a little more benefit of the doubt, and just have this sort of camaraderie or fellow feeling that we all got through this together. And isn’t that something good?

Tan: Yes, true. Can you offer any advice for those who maybe can’t afford counseling going forward, or are just looking for some kind of word of comfort?

Smith: I would just say, “You know, sweetie, maybe it’s been a really bad year, let’s just face it. It’s been really, really hard.” And go easy on yourself. Watch what you say to yourself. Try and say good things and encouraging things to yourself. Maybe temper your expectations of other people, understanding that they, too, are also really stressed. And again, just realize we’re going to take this one step at a time — we’re going to get back to normal.

Here’s just one other small piece of advice: understand what interpersonal boundaries are all about. Interpersonal boundaries are where I end and you begin — you shouldn’t feel like you have to fix all the problems of everyone around you. Let them take charge of their own problems; you attend to your problems and you all work together. So interpersonal boundaries are a really good thing. If you’re not familiar with that phrase you can go and look it up online and start reading about it. But interpersonal boundaries are a really important thing.

The other thing is margins — schedule some margins in your life. Don’t schedule things back-to-back-to-back and tasks back-to-back-to-back. Provide some margins in your life — margins between tasks, margins between different roles and even a margin in your own brain between whatever is provoking you at a moment and then your response to whatever’s provoking. You’re in the moment, and if you can just stick a tiny little margin in between what provoked you and how you respond to that provocation that’ll save you a lot of mental stress in the long run.

If you or a loved one need to talk to a mental health professional, call the national Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.

W.Va. Sees Increase In New Businesses Registered During Pandemic

The pandemic has been a nightmare for many businesses, with likely more than 100,000 small businesses shut down permanently nationwide, according to a survey from the National Bureau of Economic Research. But West Virginia saw an uptick in new businesses registered in 2020 compared to the last three years.

It might seem counterintuitive to start a business in a worldwide pandemic that has caused economic turmoil, but that’s not necessarily the case, said Ben Eng, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurial at Marshall University.

“It forces people to be scrappy, and innovative,” Eng said. “And like, that’s ultimately what the entrepreneurial spirit is, is finding new ways to solve problems and being scrappy and innovative.”

West Virginia saw more than 13,288 new businesses registered in 2020, and in 2019 there were 13,042. That figure was lower in 2018, when 10,253 were registered.

There are several factors that may have made it simpler to get a business off the ground, said Tricia Ball, associate director for the Center of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation at Marshall University. Factors include more advanced technology, low interest rates and time.

“I think some changes in unemployment and hours, and not having as many activities or events during the evenings and the weekend really give people some time to work on things that they’ve been wanting to do,” said Eng. “And then kind of have the opportunity to evaluate and be like, “Okay, what have I been doing? You know, is that really what I want to be doing?””

This extra time actually led Melissa Boothe and Brooke McKinney to start their business ‘Bubbles, Bones and Biscuits’ last spring. They make a variety of products for dogs.

“Everything about your world changed,” said Boothe. “People were out walking their dogs, and people were, you know, looking for dogs at the shelters and adopting dogs. So it just clicked in my head. Well, if all these people have all these pets, then they’re going to need stuff for them.”

Because of COVID, they did not open a brick and mortar style shop. Rather they sell products online and at festivals and bazaars.

Boothe and McKinney’s business is classified as ‘Other Personal Services,’ and this was one of the industries that grew the most in West Virginia, with 417 new businesses last year, according to West Virginia’s Business Statistics Database.

Another industry that grew was special food services — like catering and food trucks — which saw 69 new businesses in 2020.

Crafts of Coal is an ice cream truck company based in St Albans, West Virginia that opened early last summer. TJ Douglas is one of three co-founders of the food truck business.

“We knew it was really risky. But the object here was to be a little different,” Douglas said. “And so when we came up with the concept to sell ice cream, we thought it would be best to do it out of the trailer instead of a storefront.”

This allowed people to social distance, Douglas said, adding that business was successful and they are planning to re-open in the spring.

The state also recently streamlined the process for registering a business with the ‘West Virginia One Stop Business Portal,’ which allows people to submit paperwork online, rather than in-person.

“ I think that’s helping the people that have those creative ideas and have that energy that say, “I’m ready to start fresh,”” said West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner. “It makes it easy for them to get online and do that.”

However, a registered business does not necessarily mean an up-and-running business. Essentially, the name of the potential business is reserved and approved by the state. Warner said it can sometimes take awhile for the businesses to come to fruition and sometimes they never do.

For the businesses that did register and open during the worldwide pandemic last year, they will have to keep innovating in a post-COVID world, too, said Eng, the associate marketing professor at Marshall.

So far this year, 1,306 new businesses were registered in January, which is about double compared to January 2020.

“The way that people were scrappy during COVID, they should continue to be innovative and scrappy after COVID, you know,” he said. “They should never stop.”

Bill To Restrict W.Va. Municipalities From Banning Plastics, Etc. Passes House

The West Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill Tuesday that would limit local governments from banning or regulating certain plastics and to-go containers.

House Bill 2500 would disallow municipalities from banning “auxiliary containers,” which the bill defines as “ a bag, cup, bottle, or other packaging, whether reusable or single-use” that is used in the food or retail industries. Examples include plastic grocery bags, to-go food containers and plastic silverware.

Local governments would not be able to regulate, prohibit or impose a fee or tax to use these items.

Delegate Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh County, is one of the sponsors of the bill. He answered questions from Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha County, about what would be banned.

“It would be like when the city of San Francisco banned the use of plastic straws,” Steele said.

Pushkin asked Steele if there were any similar examples in West Virginia.

“It’s been discussed in several municipalities, but it hasn’t happened,” Steele said.

House Bill 2500 was passed 79 to 19 and will move onto the Senate.

To Love Or Not To Love? That Is The Question In The Animal Kingdom

With Valentine’s Day coming up, love is on a lot of people’s minds…but what about animals?

If you have ever watched animals interact, it seems like they feel love. Penguins mate for life. Elephants form a bond through wrapping their trunks together before they mate. Some types of wolves mate for life and help raise the wolf pups. So, do animals actually feel love?

Our Inside Appalachia team stumbled into this idea after producer Roxy Todd remembered a single, lonely otter she had once seen at the West Virginia State Wildlife Center.

“She looked really sad, all by herself on the rocks, not playing and not swimming,” Todd said.

She had expected to see not one otter, but lots of otters, doing what otters typically do.

“You know, when you picture otters, what do you picture? They’re having fun,” Todd said. “I had this expectation they would be frolicking doing tricks in the water.”

But she said this otter seemed despondent.

“I just kept wondering, what happened, and what was going through her head,” Todd said. “Could she feel loneliness?”

And if she could feel loneliness, Todd wondered, could the otter also feel other emotions? Like, could she feel love?

Well, this question is up for debate.

Most biologists will say that animals cannot feel love.

“Love? No, there’s no such thing in the animal kingdom,” said Rich Rogers, the furbearer biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. Rogers is helping study the regional otter population. “[Love is] an emotional term. There’s a fidelity to that family unit until those young disperse, and then no, there’s nothing there.”

So Rogers said love is an emotional term, but animals have emotions, right?

“Since Darwin, scientists have thought that there are some basic emotions that animals can feel,” said Cynthia Willett, a professor of philosophy at Emory University.

Willett published a book called ‘Interspecies Ethics’ in 2014, which explores animals’ wide variety of emotions. She said some of the obvious ones are happiness and sadness.

“But Darwin did not include love among those basic emotions. And so there’s been this prejudice or this bias, at least since that time, that animals could not experience love,” Willett said. “And yet we see it all the time with animals. So why is it that we tend to not believe what we see?”

There are a few different types of animal love Willett has studied — the mother to offspring love, which she said is clearly established. But also friendship love. Willett said in 2006 at a zoo in Japan, a snake became friends with a hamster — its prey! They even cuddled together.

And the third type of animal relationship?

“The most surprising kind of love at all is romantic love,” Willett said.

Like, love love — not just friendship love.

A good example of this behavior is with birds, Willett said. Similar to humans, birds have courtship rituals — basically, they date. They bring food to one another, do dances, clean one another, etc.

Animals generally are social creatures, Willett said, adding that they need companionship, which in a way is a form of love.

“And without it, they start to lose that ‘joie de vivre’, that sense of being alive.”

‘Joy de vivre’ is a French phrase that describes the sense of life that gives us purpose, that makes life fuller and richer — something we often find through relationships and love. And Willett said animals feel it too.

“And when they don’t have that, they shrink. They diminish. They have less energy. Life goes dull,” she said.

Although Willett has not studied otters specifically, anecdotally she said she has seen them play and bond with each other and humans. They kind of remind her of how dogs love, Willett said.

So yes, Willett said she believes otters do feel love. She added that it is not that the science or biologists are wrong, there just might be more nuance.

And for the solitary otter at West Virginia Wildlife Center? Well, Trevor Moore — the biologist at the center — said he cannot definitively rule one way or another on love, loneliness or any human-like emotion.

“Animals definitely have personalities. There are definitely individual personalities,” Moore said. “You can see that, that’s very well documented throughout science and in captivity and in the wild. But how much we project our own emotions and our own view of them? I don’t know.”

What Will The Next Year Look Like For W.Va.’s Economy?

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the economy across much of the world and the country, including West Virginia. But, economists are hopeful for recovery with the rollout of the vaccine, pointing to early signs of a rebound across several sectors and a prediction for full recovery to pre-pandemic levels next year.

This hopeful forecast is in contrast to the grim early days when within the first month of the Mountain State shutting down due to the pandemic, unemployment rates soared. West Virginia lost 92,000 jobs in April alone.

“This was what we lost, you know, during the entire Great Recession, but, having that happen in one month,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.

But by August, the state gained back more than half of those lost jobs, O’Leary said, adding that the economy initially recovered quickly as businesses re-opened in the summer. Since then, the recovery has not been as swift.

“As the pandemic has dragged on, as cases, you know, continue to rise, it never really got under control,” he said. “Things started to slow down, and we stopped adding thousands of jobs each month.”

Although growth has been ebbing and flowing this past year, the good news is West Virginia’s unemployment rate was 6.2 percent in November. This is down from April, when it was as high as 15.9 percent.

However, “economic recovery” for West Virginia doesn’t mean getting back to “the before times” or pre-COVID, O’Leary said, as the state’s economy was already in a slump when the pandemic hit.

“West Virginia in 2019 — we were steadily losing jobs, our economy was slowing down. We were headed in a negative direction, before” COVID-19 swept the nation, he said.

On average West Virginia lost about 1,000 jobs a month in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But it is not all doom and gloom — the state is on track to be back to a pre-pandemic economy by the end of 2022, said John Deskins, chief economist for West Virginia University. He said that even if those economic numbers are not the best, it’s a positive step for the future.

“We have to get back to where we were at the beginning of 2020 before we can get beyond that point. So we’re just taking one step at a time,” Deskins said.

Every industry is expected to recover and even see some growth, except for leisure, hospitality and retail, according to the West Virginia Economic Outlook Report for 2021-2025, of which Deskins is a co-author.

“That’s the sector where we have things like restaurants and bars,” Deskins said. “At one point, over half the jobs in that sector were gone back in the spring, when the lock downs were in full force.”

Those sectors can recover, Deskins said, but their resurgence is likely to come after 2022.

Predicting a full economic forecast is tricky, he added, as this recession is not based on an economic problem — like the country’s GDP, tariffs, stock market crashes or the housing bubble.

“In this case, the recession was driven by a public health problem that came, you know, completely out of left field,” Deskins said. “So the cause of this recession is completely outside of my wheelhouse.”

West Virginia’s economic trajectory could depend a lot on the roll-out of the vaccine, Deskins said. If people are vaccinated, they are more likely to go out shopping, go to work, eat out at restaurants or take trips — all things that stimulate the economy.

President Joe Biden’s goal is to have 100 million Americans immunized within his first 100 days in office. That is almost a third of the nation’s population getting the vaccine in less than four months.

Thus far, West Virginia has administered more than 130,000 vaccinations, with more than 26,000 people fully vaccinated (receiving both doses). Along with four other states, West Virginia is leading the nation in getting shots into people’s arms. Governor Jim Justice recently announced that 10,000 vaccines will be administered daily going forward.

Hunting Still Permitted In Gorge Areas Amid National Park Designation

West Virginia’s New River Gorge will soon be redesignated from a national river to a national park and preserve, and with the new title will come some changes.

The redesignation was included in a COVID relief and end-of-year federal stimulus package passed by Congress late last night.

More than 60,000 acres will be declared a national preserve, with about 7,000 acres reserved for national park status. Being a national park can come with some stricter regulations, such as limiting drone usage, berry-picking, antler-collecting and hunting.

As for the New River Gorge area, 301 acres of the Lower Gorge will remain open for hunting at the request of local hunters, according to the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority. Also, an additional 368 acres will be open for hunting in Grandview for the first time.

While many national parks charge entrance fees, the New River Gorge will remain free for tourists to access.

There are more than 60 national parks in the country, but only six combined national parks and national preserves which are all in Alaska. This new redesignation will make southern West Virginia’s New River Gorge the seventh.

The redesignation to national park and preserve is included in the stimulus bill that President Donald Trump is expected to sign into law this week.