Mourning and melancholia: the psychological shadow-pandemic Why the Covid crisis is the biggest hit to mental health since the Second World War. When organs fail, the staff on intensive care units try to take over their work. Ventilators act as lungs, medicines delivered intravenously maintain a person’s heartbeat and blood pressure, filter machines prevent a fatal build-up of waste, and everything – every drop of fluid that enters the body and every drop that leaves it – is constantly monitored by a nurse. For days or weeks or even months the ICU staff maintain bodies that have all but shut down, and still on average around one in five of their patients will not make it.
I do agree that, as some of the aforementioned research also finds, months of restrictions, isolation and uncertainty are taking a toll on the emotional well-being of increasing numbers of people. I’ve observed this in my psychotherapy practice, among the students I teach and on social media.
I take issue with the fact that it has become routine to medicalize human suffering by attaching a mental health diagnosis to it. This doesn’t address the source of people’s anguish. Nor does a diagnostic label enable something that is essential to people’s capacity to cope and adapt: deriving meaning from their own experiences.
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