The globe was already in a grave mental health crisis when the COVID-19 epidemic began. Despite the fact that at least a quarter of the population was doomed to suffer from mental illness at some point in their life, the health authorities took no steps to address the problem. And the predicament created by the new coronavirus only worsened.
Two of the key catalysts were the population’s physical isolation, as well as the dread and perplexity caused by the virus’s rapid impact on health. However, economic hardships, disinformation, and (often upsetting) rumors about everything surrounding covid-19 all played a role.
Not to mention that being exposed to inconsistent, untrustworthy, or information that focuses solely on the negative sides of a scenario can lead to mental health issues including sadness and anxiety.
Children and teenagers have been the ones who have felt the brunt of the pandemic’s psychological toll. They have experienced longer and more severe negative repercussions without the controlled environment of school, and after losing family routines and the ability to participate in sports or simply go out with friends. Eating disorders and suicide attempts were the stars on the outskirts of adolescence and youth.
Front-line health professionals, who have suffered from compassion fatigue among other things, have also struggled.
It is a type of secondary stress that happens in the therapeutic support connection when the healthcare professional’s emotional capacity overflows in order to cope with the empathetic commitment to the patient’s suffering.
The good news is that by 2021, we will have talked about mental health so extensively that many taboos will have blurred. We demonstrated how susceptible we are to life’s events by bringing Olympic athlete Simone Biles to the table.
Despite the fact that we are still far from meeting the World Health Organization’s mental health targets for 2020, it is not giving up hope and has granted us a generous extension.
We have until 2030 to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality mental health treatment. Hopefully, we do not lose the chance to take this critical step once and for all, and to prepare for what is to come, such as eco-anxiety, a persistent dread of environmental collapse that scientists believe would arise as soon as the epidemic has passed.
