Covid-19, and other viruses

How your brain is handling the pandemic? In record numbers, Americans are anxious, worried, sleep-deprived, distracted, and depressed. The China virus pandemic’s triple whammy of an invisible and omnipresent threat (coronavirus infection), profound disruptions in daily life, and uncertainty for the future has thrust many people into a chronic, high-stress state that is, let’s just say, less than optimal for rational thinking or any other sort of higher-order cognitive functioning.

While the Covid-19 pandemic rages on worldwide, the immediate mental health impact of this collective trauma is coming into focus even as the outlook for long-term psychological effects remains considerably fuzzier. People are suffering with Covid stress, covid anxiety , covid depression and covid anger ,fighting each others , pointing fingers, reduce trust in the government and health authorities who changing their mind all the time making the people less trusted with what they say.

Are we experiencing a pandemic of mental illness? Much has been reported about the ill-termed “mental health pandemic” that seems to be surging through the U.S. and other countries in lockstep with lockdowns and the death, societal disruption, and economic devastation of the viral pandemic.

Many experts have sounded the alarm too late and in some areas too shallow, for an approaching tsunami of psychological maladies that could sink an already overburdened mental healthcare system. People are not used too seen their families less, not traveling, not gathering , not going to bars and movies , not going to the games, wedding and parties, this is the heart of American and Canadian way of living ,It is hard to adjust to new reality for them . They can’t find toilet papers in the store! What the F is going on as many says.

A growing cache of data seems to bear out those fears. One of the most recent, survey conducted in April and May, found a three-fold increase in depression since the pandemic began.

The researchers examined mental health problems relative to 13 pandemic-specific stressors, including loss of a job, death of someone close to you due to Covid-19, and financial problems (see box for full list). The more stressors people reported, the more likely they were to also report symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Other studies show similar rises. From April to June, the Census Bureau tracked anxiety and depression symptoms among Americans in weekly emergency surveys, finding a sharp rise in both.

In a Kaiser Family Foundation Health conducted in July, more than half of U.S. adults (53 percent) said worry and stress related to coronavirus has had a negative impact on their mental health, up from 39 percent in May.

A key question is whether, and to what degree, pandemic-related symptoms of anxiety and depression will progress into serious mental illness and increased rates of suicide and addiction, or if all this angst and gloom is more accurately seen as a normal adaptive response to the amped-up stress that many people are experiencing during Covid.

The evolving field of disaster mental health requires that practitioners (clinicians and indigenous helpers) work with individuals and whole communities in the field rather than in an office. 

Among the lessons it has taught us is that large-scale traumatic events such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina trigger immediate and persistent psychological symptoms in large swaths of the affected population.