Let’s be real. Most of the population of the world is suffering from the psychological consequences of dealing with the huge phenomenon of the covid pandemic. It is conceivable that the pandemic may last for several more years.
See your primary care doctor or a mental health specialist for help with the psychological consequences of living through such a stressing time. Psychotherapy, counseling, peer support groups, and/or psychiatric medications may be able to help you go back to being you.
2020 and 2021 contained huge shocks for everyone on the globe. We are all feeling confused, apprehensive, and out of control. Try to use the available resources in your community.
For emergencies virtually every community has 24/7 mental health and suicide prevention hotlines. Any hospital emergency room can also provide immediate help.
For the last 15 years of my professional career, I coordinated consensus processes to build new local health and social services policies.
It was the best work and most fun I experienced during my career.
I was lucky to work with more than two thousand participants (in aggregate) helping to develop services for drug abuse, mental illness, social isolation, education, child care, medical services, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, and more.
Here is a diagram of what I believe to be key parts of developing consensus public policy.
Click on the mind map to expand it.
Had various government agencies used a model like mine, they would have been able to get a higher percentage of the population agree to be vaccinated.
Get vaccinated. Your risk of getting Covid-19 is going way up if you are unvaccinated. If you do not have access to vaccine, wear a mask, stay six feet away from others, stay out of crowds, and wash your hands.
Variant Delta (D or the Indian variant also well-established in the UK) is the most severe of all variants to date, and is becoming the dominant version of Covid-19 in many countries. Many public health professionals predict that within a few months Variant Delta will the dominant strain globally and in the USA, much as it is currently dominant in India and the UK..
If you want to see the most current information about Covid-19, Variant Delta, search with Google or an alternative search engine. As I write this on June 19, 2021, there is a huge amount of news stories available. CNN has had good coverage on Variant Delta.
Current information is that Variant Delta is the most problematic and deadly Covid-19 variant yet.
The World Health Organization is supposed to be collecting donations of money and covid-19 vaccine doses from large-rich countries and distributing them to small-poor countries.
Is the World Health Organization or WHO or ??? doing a good job?
C+ at best.
But they are good at nagging and blaming large-rich countries that are donating medical supplies and vaccine doses and healthcare supplies and food and water and $s.
WHO should be doing a much better job than it has during the past 18 months. They need to stop whining and writing academic papers and get their staff doing the heavy lifting in getting the vaccine doses they are receiving out to where they are needed most.
During the past covid “pandemic” year (March 2020 through May 2021), have you woken up every day feeling “lost” or “confused” or “depressed” or “anxious” or ” numb” or like something is “wrong” or “inescapable” or with any of hundreds of more negative feelings?
It is my guess that virtually no one has escaped these feelings during the global fight against covid-19 A lot of the feelings originating from situations occurring during the covid pandemic are visible to everyone. News outlets inform us daily that cases of suicide and violence and most major mental illness and drug abuse and murders are at very high levels compared to historical norms. We can often recognize these major interruptions to “normal life” and hopefully many professional services to combat major stress-induced illnesses and condition can be offered.
We probably — as a global community — have a “fighting chance” of protecting and or preventing the outbreaks of mental illness and stress breakdowns among many because we recognize these conditions as medical ones that are then referred to qualified physicians or social workers or psychologists to handle.
More insidious and of great longevity are issues like continuous rage or feeling numb and defenseless or apathetic or unable too motivate yourself too walk out the door and deal with issues in the larger real world that you could avoid when hiding inside from covid. Your friends and family might see many of these huge, chronic problems are not rising to a level of concern to be considered a medical condition. Most physicians will also have a lot of difficulty in deciding whether it is appropriate to treat these “reconnection” as medical conditions and with pharmaceuticals they will need to repurpose for conditions are less defined and more chronic than many of the psychiatric-psychological problems they traditionally saw.
Diagnostic categories and conditions are going to have to be significantly revised when Americans start to engage with the old reality or refuse to even try to do so.
What is the United States and all of our sister countries in the global community going to be facing? The mind map below starts to summarize what we are all going to be facing as we restart countries in a year or two when vaccines are provided to all.
