Plea to ‘stay active’ in latest lockdown
A MENTAL health specialist is encouraging people to escape any inner turmoil that may be bubbling up during the six-week lockdown by staying active and getting exercise.
Psychotherapist Iseult White told the Irish Daily Mail that six months of living with Covid-19 and uncertainty about when it will end has created a ‘toxic cocktail of chronic stress’.
‘Social connection is a fundamental psychological need of human creatures, it improves our mood and takes us out of our heads,’ Ms White said.
She also stressed the importance of exercise and spending time in nature as ways to reduce stress and anxiety, and added that going into a lockdown in the winter was a ‘horrible feeling’.
Calling for people to look after those around us, she said: ‘I think in the first wave, there was a much greater sense of unity in the country and a much greater sense of, “We’re in this together and this is a thing we can get through”.
‘And I think what’s different now is that we’ve been under kind of chronic stress for six months.’
Ms White said the Level 5 restrictions were not as severe as measures imposed to slow the first wave of the virus. She said: ‘We keep calling it Lockdown II; it’s very different. Our kids are going out to school, we can go five kilometres instead of two kilometres, there’s going to be a lot more businesses open that weren’t open last time.’
However, Fianna Fáil TD Marc MacSharry said that Level 5 restrictions would harm mental health, especially in young people.
He told the Mail: ‘The only strategy that seems to be emerging is the rolling lockdown, where if we get cases under 100 per 100,000 by the first of December, maybe we’ll
‘Mental health crisis’
go back towards Level 3.
‘Level 3 still excludes all normal social entertainment that we would have before, there won’t be nightclubs and discotheques or whatever and there won’t be eating inside. The problem beneath the surface here is a catastrophic mental health crisis that we need to begin to deal with as we go.’