By Bryan Robinson, May 1, 2020
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It has been observed in the United States since 1949, reaching millions of people. There is no better time than the month of May, 2020 to highlight the importance of helping people re-adjust from the aftermath of the earth-shattering pandemic that has thrown so many of us off the normal course of our personal and professional lives. That includes first responders and all the medical personnel also suffering from PTSD and other disorders, like top New York City ER doctor, Lorna Brean, 49, who took her own life after recovering from COVID-19 and going back on the grueling front lines.
Although self-isolation is ending at different times in different states, at some point we will return to offices, restaurants and houses of worship. But what will that look like? One thing is for sure, we won’t ever return to normal; we will return to “a new normal.” And each of us will have repair work to do as we re-enter the world of physical proximity to coworkers and reconnecting with friends, neighbors and loved ones. Not just contagion worries, but recovering from the psychological trauma of having lived under chronic uncertainty, isolation, financial insecurity, job loss and for some, death of friends and loved ones—taken together enough trauma for a massive mental health crisis.
The trauma, like the virus, will not simply disappear. It will to be with us in our memories, daydreams and nightmares. What can we expect and what measures can we take? Disaster researchers warn that the pandemic could inflict long-lasting psychological trauma on an unprecedented global scale. With some 2.6 billion people worldwide in some kind of lockdown, Dr. Elke Van Hoof, Professor of health psychology and primary care psychology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, calls lockdown the biggest psychological experiment and predicts we will pay the price through a secondary epidemic of burnouts and stress-related absenteeism in the latter half of 2020. Van Hoof cites one study in China, where parents were quarantined with children, that reported no less than 28% of quarantined parents warranted a diagnosis of trauma-related mental health disorder.
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