Our next crisis? The damage to our mental wellbeing
THE coronavirus pandemic is about more than just a respiratory disease. As consuming as all the talk of symptoms, infection rates and comorbidities can be, the virus itself is not the only thing people are struggling to get a handle on.
The economic fallout is already bigger than the global crash of 2008, and the evidence is all around us in the shuttered shops and deserted streets that characterise a physical and financial lockdown.
That the Treasury has had to step in and is now paying the wages of a quarter of the UK’s workers is both reassuring and frightening in equal measure.
But there is a third impact that we can see coming. Indeed, the water is beginning to lap at our ankles even as the tsunami blots light from the horizon.
This third wave is the effect on mental health that such a deadly and disruptive outbreak is already beginning to have.
Right now, some of the biggest issues are anxiety, grief and isolation. Public health messaging, supported by broadcasters, has done well to reassure people that it’s OK not to feel OK.
And a concerted push to remind people to keep talking has helped prompt some of those most at risk of withdrawing completely to remember to reach out.
But as a short-term voluntary house arrest becomes a much more burdensome period without physical contact, that aching dullness in the pit of the stomach will only grow.
Those people who have lost loved ones – either to the virus or something else – and have not had the chance to have a proper funeral, a hug from family or a night down the pub to drink and remember with friends, are not seeing the same opportunities to work through grief.
Workers, furloughed but not knowing if their job will even exist by the summer, watch their worries grow with every doomladen news bulletin.
Even those who know their boss is waiting for the green light to get everyone back into the office FINALLY, some good jobs news for Scotland. Tech firm Honeywell, based in Newhouse, Lanarkshire, has won a UK Government contract to make 70 million face masks. It’s part of the effort to build up Britain’s PPE manufacturing after every country was affected by a global shortage of personal protective equipment. As well as getting the much-needed masks to the Covid front line, the deal will create 450 new jobs. Well done to all involved. are fretting whether it is safe to do so. They may also be worried that, because they have children but no school or childcare, they will not be able to be as physically present as colleagues.
Some people have ploughed everything into setting up a business of their own, spending years working all the hours God sends to hustle and harry and build it into a going concern, They have watched, helpless, as something completely beyond their control has reduced it to dust in only a few short weeks.
HOW to pay the mortgage? Put food on the table? Get back into the jobs market when hundreds of thousands have landed on the dole at the same time and no one is hiring?
Then there are those who know they are not well. Who were receiving treatment before almost all non-Covid-19 care stopped and have no idea when they’ll get the operation they need, or whether all those extra months of waiting means they’ll never get fully better. What about the mental impact on those desperate for a family, finally receiving IVF treatment only to have it suspended halfway through, leaving them in tortuous limbo with nothing but an imaginary ticking clock reducing their chance of conception with every passing month, week, day and hour.
We are already being told by experts to treat NHS staff like military returning from war, as many will be at risk of posttraumatic stress disorder due to the intensity of the coronavirus response.
But that is not the only warning we should be heeding.
Every example above – losing your job, losing a loved one, financial hardship, inability to have a much-longed-for child, chronic illness or injury – is a common trigger for anxiety, depression or other forms of mental ill health.
Tomorrow is the start of mental health awareness week. I don’t doubt how much effort and bandwith is going into the immediate Covid-19 response from both the Scottish and UK Government and I don’t envy them the overwhelming challenges they face.
But I would urge both administrations to scan the horizon and recognise what is coming.
Millions of people across the UK are going to need support long after the Covid-19 wards shut and the furlough schemes are withdrawn.
We can see this third wave of impact coming. We need to be ready.