Age-stratified clinical characteristics and long-term neurological outcomes of pediatric herpes simplex virus encephalitis: a longitudinal cohort study of 56 children.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the most severe public health crisis of the 21st century, inflicted profound and enduring health and social consequences worldwide (). As societies gradually returned to a semblance of normalcy, the pandemic appeared to be receding from public memory. For those who lost loved ones during this period, however, psychological wounds remained unhealed. A survey of university teachers in Wuhan revealed that educators who lost family members to COVID-19 faced a 459% increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ()—a stark demonstration of the devastating psychological impact of bereavement on this professional group. This population bore a unique dual burden. Bereaved teachers confronted profound personal grief while simultaneously fulfilling their professional mandate to educate and provide emotional support to students at a critical developmental stage. documented that teachers experienced significant grief and burnout during the pandemic, with these pressures persisting long after the acute crisis subsided. reported that 70% of teachers had grieving students in their classrooms; yet research on how educators coped with their own grief remained conspicuously inadequate. Critically, the nature of their professional role often deprived bereaved teachers of the time and space needed to process their loss, rendering their suffering a form of disenfranchised grief—grief that was not publicly acknowledged or socially supported (). This disenfranchisement rendered teachers’ psychological struggles highly invisible, leaving them systematically neglected in both academic inquiry and support provision. For pandemic-bereaved teachers, the loss of a loved one triggered not merely emotional distress but a profound existential crisis. existential psychology identified four ultimate concerns confronting humanity: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Bereavement directly confronted individuals with mortality, fundamentally destabilizing their beliefs about life’s meaning. found that during the COVID-19 crisis, teachers exhibited higher levels of existential anxiety than students. further found that teachers’ existential thinking and sense of meaning in life negatively predicted their pandemic-related anxiety. conceptualized existential anxiety as anxiety transcending objective threat and pertaining to existence itself, indicating its strong association with PTSD and negative correlations with self-esteem and emotion regulation. When existential anxiety was activated, psychological resources became rapidly depleted—a process that constituted the underlying mechanism of burnout. From an existential perspective, argued that burnout originated from individuals’ fundamental need to believe their lives and work were meaningful. further showed that existential fulfilment played a significant role across burnout dimensions. For teachers already confronting meaning crises following bereavement, burnout may constitute a secondary assault on their sense of existential purpose, accelerating the deepening of existential anxiety. Accordingly, adopting a perspective that honored the lived experience of bereaved individuals, the present investigation selected existential anxiety as its focal outcome variable.