GENE THERAPY
Gene Collier asks: Is mental health the pandemic after the pandemic?
Worried? Restless? Fearful? Despairing?
Check, check, check and check.
Feeling helpless due to disruptive life changes outside your control? Filling free time with meaningless, mindless distractions? Check and double check. And yes, that was all before the virus hit.
This probably won’t come as a shock, but compromised and debilitating mental health conditions didn’t arrive with COVID-19 this winter; they were long established, widespread, underfunded, set aside, stigmatized and primed to explode toward their own pandemic at the first invitation. So guess what time it is? A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a Canadian entrepreneur named Greg Smith, founder of Thinkific, an e-learning platform on which courses across a spectrum of disciplines are created and consumed, which happens to be a business model that’s booming despite the pandemic.
“From what I’m seeing here,” he said from Vancouver, British Columbia, “3,000 more people last week were taking mental health courses over the week previous. So we’ve seen a 375% increase in the number of new mental health courses being created, and the number of people taking them.”
Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan gaggle of U.S. senators urged this week that Phase IV of the coronavirus relief package include a substantial investment in the nation’s mental and behavioral health, in part because more than 5 million Americans with mental health issues are uninsured, and particularly because multiple sources are reporting unprecedented levels of stress and worry in the populace.
Gallup reported that the number of anxious Americans,
a stat with little fluctuation over time, is up 14% since last summer, and the number of respondents feeling worried is up 21%.
The corresponding figures during the 2008 recession, by comparison, were 3% and 5%.
For the moment then, Gallup says 60% of Americans are feeling stress or worry. No info on what the other 40% are feeling. Their guns?
A substantial contributing factor here is isolation, which isn’t going to disappear “magically” overnight. This kind of disruption to customary human rhythms is an obvious tax on any culture’s collective mental health. It’s perhaps even more ominous in an American culture with mental health issues that were already at alarming levels.
“We’re losing about 50,000 people to suicide, less than half of what we lose to suicide and overdose combined,” former Sen. Patrick Kennedy was saying on a cable news channel the other day. “If you think 48,000 suicides is bad per year before COVID-19, and 72,000 overdoses is bad before COVID19, imagine what those numbers are gonna look like when you add on the dislocation, the unemployment, the stress and the trauma that we’re going to see.”
Mr. Kennedy, of Rhode Island, founded The Kennedy Forum, a leading platform for mental health reform and advocacy since 2013.
“What I don’t want to have happen, is, we shouldn’t be flat-footed like our nation was in response to COVID,” he said. “We knew better, and the challenge here with the mental health tsunami headed our way is that we have a chance to act differently than we did with COVID. Here’s our opportunity to prepare. I worry that the same thing ... is going to happen to us as a nation when it comes to the tsunami of mental health and addiction.”
Seems like a good time for Mental Health Awareness Month, which is May, conveniently.
But Mr. Kennedy unwittingly introduced a highly recommended strategy relative to the first pandemic: stop watching the news all the time. Educate yourself as best you can, obviously, but restrict the constant monitoring of mostly terrible news, which is not good for your mental health. Control your focus, take deep breaths, stretch, meditate, eat well-balanced meals, exercise, get plenty of sleep, make time to unwind, connect with others, and when necessary, avail yourself to the wealth of mental health services through government agencies, hospitals, universities, and private and community sources.
There are plenty of caring people out there, even as Pittsburgh lost one of the very best last month in Dick Jevon, who’d spent most of a lifetime helping people with mental illnesses, their families, and any formal or informal agency through which he could leverage better mental health care and coverage. Activated by a diagnosis of schizophrenia in a family member, Mr. Jevon never turned down a phone call from a patient, a family member or anyone he could help navigate that unique strain of emotional pain and stress.
A past president of the Allegheny County MH/MR board and a board member for the southwestern Pennsylvania branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Mr. Jevon died April 12 at the age of 89, attaining everlasting peace at just the moment his country could use a cool million Dick Jevons.