EDITORIAL

covid-19 mental health 

Are you calling me mentally ill?

Given the flood of Covid-related news these days, on all news platforms, covering every conceivable subject affected by the pandemic, including reports, articles, interviews and blogs by specialists and non-specialists (often as if specialization on the subject is irrelevant)  ...  it is no wonder we're staring off blankly sometimes, wishing for an an earlier time when there were merely terrorists, the drug world, and hucksters after us.  Well, let me warn you, this staring-off is a mental illness.

Mental illness doesn't mean sedation or a straight-jacket.  As psychiatrist RD Laing advised us decades ago, we are all somewhere on the mental-illness spectrum.  And the needles move, depending on our moving lives. Today, our needles are high.

What that means is that the pandemic, or part of it, is pushing us each against our own walls. Some more than others, some not at all -- but that's likely not you or me.  Reduced contact with others, alone, is a very damaging, punishing  force. We put people in jail to punish them.  Exile is considered devastating.   And yet this is what we are voluntarily doing to ourselves -- to avoid the larger calamities of sickness and death, yes, but, although we are still living and largely healthy, we are all also feeling the effects of this persuasive isolation.  

We've seen many other negative effects and difficulties -- paying rent, for example, or getting the school year completed -- and we Canadians have been quite successful in averting and avoiding the worst of the disease.  But are we paying enough attention to the quiet stalker, mental difficulties? 

Are we each paying enough attention to our own stalker?  

Our anxieties and fears, our worst expectations, even childhood-impressed reactions -- the list is detailed and lengthy and it includes all the serious, diagnosed conditions and complexes we see within our communities.  There's little reason to believe anyone is un-affected.

Self-diagnosis (of ourselves and those around us) is considered unreliable.  If our minds and judgements are mis-firing,  can we rely on our minds and judgements to decide if there's a problem affecting us or not?

Isn't it wisest to assume that, yes, we are all affected, our partners and spouses, kids, parents, friends and co-workers. You. Me. 

We are all affected.  But our psychological reaction to isolation is not just one more crisis for us; we have enough.  It's more a huge warning sign that we have to be more understanding of those around us, accommodating as much as possible,  as helpful as we can be. Such reactions will end up helping us, we who practise them.  Simple stuff. We ought to be less demanding, much less critical.  The experts in the field and the scientists are giving us sage advice and it will keep coming. In the meantime, why not just be nicer?  Nicer to ourselves, too.