PANDEMIC EXPOSES INNER STRUGGLES
Amid the more blatant societal effects of COVID-19, there has also been a less obvious psychological toll.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in January and the resultant lockdown of cities around China, people have experienced different inner changes as the pandemic has developed and they gradually understand the virus.
In a press conference on March 29, Qiao Zhihong, professor of psychology from Beijing Normal University, reported the common psychological problems people have been confronting since the outbreak.
Since Jan 24, BNU has organized a team of 300 psychological consultants and opened a hotline and an online consulting platform to the public. Thirty people called in the first minute, he said.
By March 28, the public consulting services had received calls or queries from 6,300 people, among which 58 percent were just regular people, 13 percent were people in quarantine, 5 percent were medical workers, 5 percent were confirmed patients, 4 percent were relatives and friends of medical workers, and 3 percent were patients’ relatives and friends.
“At the start of the outbreak, knowing the virus was highly infectious, people started feeling anxious, panicked, angry, helpless, and depressed on a large scale. These problems not only affected individuals’ immune systems and heath, but also the social mentality as a whole,” he said.
Xu Xiaodan, a PhD candidate from Beijing Normal University, and her fellow students and peers from universities around the world, such as Harvard University and National University of Singapore, have been using their nonprofit platform Jingshi Zhuxin to help students in primary and middle schools.
When she was an undergraduate student of psychology in Chongqing, after the Wenchuan earthquake occurred in 2008, Xu went to the region to help alleviate people’s psychological problems. She met a high school girl in Deyang, whose parents both died in the earthquake. They became friends and stayed in touch online. However, in 2013, the girl committed suicide in her third year of university, an act which influenced Xu greatly. She started questioning the meaning of her study. In 2014, she started the nonprofit organization JSZX, aiming to help students from primary and middle school with psychological problems.
Xu says they have been contacted by two kinds of students and parents since the outbreak of COVID19. The first are students who have serious depression and anxiety, and with a tendency toward suicide.
“We usually transfer them to professional medical institutes,” she says.
The second kind, she says, are students with lighter problems, such as light anxiety and depression, which are caused by conflicts with parents when they study at home. Additionally, many students feel lonely during quarantine.
The most anxious students are those who are going to take important exams, especially college and high school entrance exams.
“They are very anxious. We saw some kids leave messages on our platform, saying that teachers asked them to study new subject matter at home by themselves, but they didn’t. Then, when online classes began, the teachers — who assumed the students were up to speed — delved straight into the new subject matter that they did not know. What should they do?” Xu says.
“Some kids in remote areas don’t have the resources for online classes, and their parents don’t care that much, so some of them became very anxious. We helped them to understand what kind of psychological issues they might be dealing with once school reopens, and why they would be like that?” she says, adding that “we gave them suggestions through cartoons, short videos, articles and livestreaming lectures.”
With diversified access points, including a WeChat account, a mobile app, group chats, and psychological consulting, JSZX has reached 10,000 parents and students. More than 37,000 people downloaded their app within five days of its launch.
“For students who are going to attend the college entrance examinations in July, we usually help them to clarify their goal and reduce their anxiety,” Xu says.
Despite the psychological pressures that people have endured during the outbreak, many have been trying to adapt themselves to the situation.
Ma Ruwei, 18, is a grade-three student at Nanjing High School of Jiangsu Province. If things go smoothly, he will go to Georgia Institute of Technology in August. However, due to the pandemic, the tests for international students have been canceled globally and he may not be able to go to the US, not least due to the scarcity of flights. But he says that he is not anxious. He spent the extended winter vacation reading
by Karl Max and reconsidering the direction of his studies.
“Because we had more time at home without the supervision of our teachers, it’s very easy to spend too much time enjoying entertainment, like video games. I was thinking about how to best use the additional time and that getting addicted to entertainment will do more harm than good,” he says.
Originally Ma wanted to study economics at university, and has been gearing up for that for the last three years, but he recently changed his mind.
“Now I want to study to become an industrial engineer instead, something I think can really help to build a better world,” he says.
He is not worried about the scarcity of flights to the US, either. “It’s fine if we have to study online. As long as I can study what I like, then I don’t mind where I am,” he says.
His parents, however, are anxious, fearing that his path to university might not be so smooth anymore, or that the changing domestic policies in the US will interrupt their son’s study.
“They even suggested that I switch to a university in Hong Kong,” he says.
Now Ma’s school has reopened. He says that, in the coming months, he will try his best to achieve good scores in all the tests, which he thinks will be important references for international universities to consider his admission.
Ma says that he gets his inspiration from his best friends who will attend the college entrance examinations.
“Now the college entrance examinations are delayed for a month, but my friends said they will try their best to get good scores. They said that anxiety is not helpful right now,” he says.
For 26-year-old Zhu Zeyu in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, the most anxious time has passed.
“It was when the epidemic just started in late January and February. I stayed up late, usually until 2 am, reading the latest news about the epidemic,” he says.
The country was locked down, so were all the entertainment facilities. Zhu used to be a teacher at an art exam training institution in Yinchuan, but he had to stay home with his parents, unable to work and having no income.
“When I was anxious, I talked to my friends about the news and my worries,” he says.
In late February, when the epidemic was gradually coming under control in China and normal activities were resuming, Zhu registered an account as a delivery man on Meituan Waimai, an online takeaway food ordering platform.
It was a hard work — and highly competitive because more people joined the platform — but with a low salary.
“Customers in quarantine were generally patient, however, which was good,” he says.
After two weeks, Zhu stopped the delivery work, instead become a writer for a website writing online novels.
“If I can keep writing 10,000 words a day for one month, they will give me 1,800 yuan no matter how many people read my work,” he says.
He got along with his parents quite well. “The secret is don’t be lazy. My mom cooks and I wash the dishes. My mom is also a kindergarten teacher, so I help her to make videos for her online classes,” he says.
However, for parents whose children go to kindergarten, this quarantine life is especially hard, especially when they need to work full time with small kids running around.
Hu Xuhui, professor of linguistics at Peking University, says that he breaks down at least once a day due to his five-year-old son, who loves to be around parents.
He needs to teach online, write papers, prepare meals and play with his son.
“Normally, we send him to kindergarten, so we can work. Even during holidays, we will send him to do training activities, so we can have some time for ourselves. I could study at a cafe, but now we can only stay indoors, which is a huge challenge for both my wife and I,” he says.
Another difficulty is teaching online.
“Although we save our time spent commuting to classrooms, it requires much more energy and attention to teach online. I cannot interact with students and I can’t read their expression to see whether they understand me, so that I have to speak a lot more to make sure they can understand when I talk about difficult theories,” he says, adding that “many students don’t turn on their cameras during class.”
However, he says he is trying his best to work, expecting that things will get back to normal soon.
Colleges and universities are still closed now, but many businesses have restarted. Hu Zunmei, 37, in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, says that her business of building digital cloud-based storage systems, although delayed for several months, has now fully resumed.
“Jiangsu managed things very well. At the beginning, I was a bit worried, reading news about the epidemic and Wuhan, but I was not very anxious, maybe because I am an optimistic person. I somehow believe that the government can control it,” she says.
Recently, she attended an online meeting of the local business union, finding that people in general are doing well, switching their focus from physical stores to online platforms very quickly, although some of her friend’s businesses were impacted.
“People are very flexible, so things are not very different from the past before the epidemic broke out here,” she says.
At the start of the outbreak, ... people started feeling anxious and depressed on a large scale. These problems not only affected individuals’ immune systems and heath, but also the social mentality as a whole.” Qiao Zhihong, professor of psychology from Beijing Normal University