People have different styles of coping with crises and different means and resources to do so. Ayalon and Lahad (2000) summarize a study on children who, as residents of Israel’s northern border region, were continuously exposed to extensive periods of Syrian rocket attacks. The researchers, who devoted many years of research to this topic, offer a model of six clusters of resources for coping with stress, uncertainty, and crisis. According to this model, individuals with a physical/bodily coping style cope and respond primarily through their body and through physical responses and bodily sensations. The coping language of such individuals may include meditation, physical activity, eating, and sleeping. In contrast, people whose preferred coping style is cognition and cognitive mechanisms will typically collect information, solve problems, and make plans. The remaining four clusters of coping resources are emotions, belief systems, social resources, and imagination. In coping with a crisis, every person uses coping mechanisms from more than one cluster, and their combination creates the person’s individual coping pattern.
Already in the 1960s, Caplan (1964) defined a crisis as a loss of balance between a problem’s severity and the resources available for its resolution. More recent studies (e.g., Lating & Bono, 2008) note that while some people who experience a traumatic event manage to prevail and return to their routine lives, others continue to suffer from the event for a prolonged period.
The term resilience is used to describe the availability of one’s coping mechanisms in stressful situations. Resilience is a mental state and sense of efficacy and belief in one’s ability to successfully cope with crises and pressure of life’s challenges and rise above adversity (Wolin & Wolin, 2010). Wolin and Wolin propose a model of six traits and skills that comprise resilience: insight, independence, relationships, initiative, humor, creativity, and morality. It is rare to find individuals who have all the traits and skills, or in which all these traits are expressed. According to this model, in order to help people in a crisis find their inner strength, overcome adversity, and reground themselves, therapists should assess and develop their clients’ latent coping potential.
The impact of Covid-19 is not, however, limited to the individual level. Let us proceed to look at the societal level. Rosenthal, Boin, and Comfort, (2001) define a crisis as a situation in which political- administrative elites perceive a threat to the core values of a society and/or life-sustaining systems in that society that must be addressed urgently under conditions of deep uncertainty. Both parts of the definition appear to refer directly to the Covid pandemic, whose greatest threat for many countries including Israel is the collapse of the healthcare system and the collapse of the economic system as a result of Covid-related restrictions. In a recent article, Boin, Ekengren, and Rhinard (2020) define the Covid-19 crisis as a ‘creeping crisis,’ which is a specific species of trouble to which modern society is especially vulnerable. A creeping crisis carries the potential for societal disruption that is not fully understood:
A creeping crisis is a threat to widely shared societal values or life‐sustaining systems that evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, subject to varying degrees of political and/or societal attention, and impartially or insufficiently addressed by authorities.
