An episode for your weekend: Miles Griffis, The Sick Times
We learn about a website that covers the Long COVID crisis.
In this episode of The Journalism Salute, Mark Simon chats with Miles Griffis, co-founder and editor of The Sick Times, an online magazine focused on the long-term effects of Covid, also known as Long Covid. As The Sick Times celebrates its first anniversary, Griffis reflects on his personal struggles with Long COVID and his mission to spread awareness around this overlooked and under-reported condition. You can subscribe to their weekly newsletter here and follow them on Instagram.
Beyond his work at The Sick Times, Griffis is also passionate about LGBTQ culture and travel. His column for the High Country News, Confetti Westerns, is a collection of poignant essays about “queer nature and culture in the American Southwest.”
Can you explain the origin of The Sick Times?
Betsy Ladyzhets, my co-founder, came to me with this idea to launch a nonprofit news site that would be specifically about long COVID. For the past few years before that, we had both grown pretty frustrated with the reporting that was happening on long COVID, and the difficulty as freelancers to place stories about long COVID. I would get requests from editors to spin stories to be more positive, just these little things that weren't really in the reality of the topic of Long COVID.
Betsy has done really incredible reporting on the National Institute of Health's Recovery Initiative. That is sort of the main the main study that the U. S. government is funding on Long COVID. It's received over 1.5 billion dollars over the past four years, and her reporting has sort of showed that they're kind of fumbled it and haven't used those funds to prioritize the most high impact research haven’t really listened to people living with the disease.
—Miles Griffis for The Journalism Salute
Asaka’s take:
Usually, if someone’s sharing posts about Long COVID, and they don’t have the condition themselves, they usually have some other chronic illness. Covid, in general, is a bigger concern for people who are immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk. That being said, Long COVID could happen to previously healthy people, too, as Griffis mentions on the podcast. Griffis was one of them.
What's the experience of doing personal experience writing, and what's your goal when you do it?
Long COVID has a wide spectrum of severity, so we need people to share their experience, whether it might be something, I guess less disabling—lot of people are able to work full time still who have symptoms of Long COVID—to people who are bedbound with it…I just sort of started as a ‘here's what I'm experiencing’ as anyone else, or sort of as a warning that death isn't the only thing we should worry about from COVID-19... A lot of the conditions COVID can cause could be lifelong.
Asaka’s take:
One thing that stands out to me about Griffis is his versatility. As someone who writes about health-related topics, I’m inspired by how he juggles writing informative, educational pieces and more personal pieces.
When it comes to his own writing process, Griffis says he paces himself and strategically outsources tasks, which is something I also think about.
All the articles in The Sick Times have “key points” in the beginning of each article to make the content more accessible, especially to readers who have brain fog and may struggle to read a long blocks of text. I thought that was wonderful.
Who are you writing for?
Our main audience is people who are living with long COVID, but they have caretakers, they have family there's researchers, there's doctors. So we kind of view it as like this extended community as well as just people who are more COVID aware.
My colleague Betsy [Ladyzhets] does weekly COVID 19 updates … I remember when the New York Times was doing comprehensive, state-by-state [coverage], I looked at it every day, so I had a handle on it. At least from my perspective … that coverage doesn't really exist anymore.
“I write about and record my experiences with my disease, not just to process the denial and pain of this overlooked crisis, but to cast spells that will ricochet into the future. I want my words to be resurrected for other people with this disease, or the diseases caused by pandemics in the future. A noisy spirit that weaves its way through time and moves objects that society has tried to bury to the forefront, where they can't be denied. I want to appear out of nowhere, like black ink on a white blank page, like water on the desert floor.”
-Learning How To Live and Die With Long COVID
How did you come up with the ending [of Learning How To Live And Die With Long COVID]?
One of my loves is getting outside into the outdoors which has been very limited by since I got long COVID. But I was able to go float on Lake Manly, which is an ephemeral lake, in the middle of the Mojave Desert in Death Valley National Park.
And it was the deepest it had been in, I think, over 30 years this past winter. So this three, two to three foot lake of water just sort of appeared in the middle of Death Valley.
…
There's an AIDS activist, an artist that I've been following, and he spent time in that area as well, so this essay was kind of a a tribute to him in some ways, and the, just the importance of recording your experience with a disease.
Asaka’s take:
Throughout history, marginalized communities have played an important role in public health discourse. Whether you're disabled/chronically ill, or living in a socioeconomic "desert," if you're more likely to face serious health risks, you're going to speak up as if your life depends on it—because it often does.
This interview, along with other interview, underscores the need to engage with in these conversations with empathy, and give proper credit to the ones sounding the alarms before—and after—an issue is deemed “trendy” by the 24-hour news cycle.
If I was a college student and this was an area that I wanted to report on, what guidance would you have for doing it well?
The first is highlighting people with long COVID. So, talking to your classmates, your people within the community, administration, staff members, seeing how long COVID is affecting their work, their experience at college, and then finding the right researchers to speak with.
Seeing people who have published on Long COVID is helpful for some research and seeing people who are actually treating people with Long COVID … If your city or state has [a Long COVID clinic], those could be good sources to reach out to. These will be experts who have a lot of experience looking at Long COVID instead of, some people have expertise in COVID-19 and trends and epidemiology, but they don't actually have that patient experience.
And that's so important to prioritize.
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Q: What are the key points to know with where we are in regards to the fight against long COVID?
We have a lot of different theories of what is causing Long COVID. I think the media often, goes to the lazy trope of this “mysterious disease”, but we have thousands and thousands of papers about it … So some of the main theories right now are viral persistence … Another one is that it is an autoimmune disease. So the body is sort of fighting itself because of some activation from COVID. And another one is reactivated viruses … And there are other theories with the gut microbiome, and it could be a combination of a lot of these theories.
Asaka’s Take
According to the CDC, 6.8% of Americans recently reported having long Covid and 17.6% have said they had Long COVID at some point. And yet, politicians rarely acknowledge it as a prevalent public health concern.
Some, says Griffis, may not be aware that they have it. Personally, I wonder how much long Covid plays a role in my generation’s mental health. For example, an increased rate of ADHD diagnoses during the pandemic is typically attributed to decompensation in the absence of a structured learning environment and heightened awareness due to Internet usage. However, brain fog from COVID may also resemble these symptoms.
I would love to see more digestible information about differential diagnoses for someone who might have Long COVID.