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Network? Connected. Therapist? Connected. Emotional bond? Connecting .
From anxiety to insecurity and loss and lethargy, psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health care workers saw a spike in the number of people who found themselves seeking help.
Synopsis
Was it easy? Finding comfort and help virtually when sitting across your therapist was not an option?
The pandemic wasn’t easy on anyone including the mental health experts who suddenly had a huge demand to meet. While people were locked at home, the mental health issues that were lingering in the corner of their minds slowly started to unravel. With the pandemic and the stay-at-home culture that came in its wake, life as we knew it, had changed. And for many the change was not easy, struggling with a myriad of emotions. From anxiety to
As many know, the pandemic has contributed to a rise in depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts over the last 15 months: isolation, loss of work, fear of contacting or spreading the virus, and loss of loved ones have been hard to cope with, to say the least.
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Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
Doctoral student Angélique Bernabé was on a Zoom call, doing a mock interview with university colleagues as part of her job search, when she broke down in tears. The other people on the call rushed to reassure her: She was doing well, she’d find a job. But the issue was more profound. She was lonely.
Many spoke of feeling resilient to the challenges of the pandemic at its onset, but now are experiencing exhaustion and fatigue. Some wrote of the difficulty in voicing their feelings when they know others are worse off. “They are probably fighting their own battles. I find it difficult to ask for help,” one reader wrote.
The following responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Readers spoke of the pandemic’s duration and the mounting difficulty of managing a year in:
I think it’s this throbbing drone of the ambiguity of life from day-to-day. No plans, no future to really put one’s finger on. I have a grandson nearly 11-months-old I’ve never held. Or seen his mother, my daughter, in a year and a half. Many of my closest friendships have been disrupted, lives are in confusion and flux all over the place. Connections with many of the things that made me, me are fading. It’s biting pretty hard.