We are engaged in a war. Not a typical war where an enemy is clearly identifiable. We’re up against an invisible enemy: the Covid-19 virus.
The conflict requires something unique and brutally wrenching from its civilians: isolation and physical disconnection. The collective life force has been stopped dead in its tracks now for over a year. Society’s mental wellness clearly has declined, rapidly.
Dangerous shaming camps have formed. Coalitions divide people in ways that simply did not happen during the world wars, when physical interaction created a deep sense of unity and everyone was “in this fight together.”
Closer attention must be paid to far-reaching impact on the psyches of our communities across the United States and the world.
While survival is of course critical, we must not underestimate how creating a great social distance takes its toll by separating families, friends and neighbors.
While some say it’s a small price to pay for survival, one cannot minimize the dangerous impact of disconnection. Depression is a debilitating disease, with an alarming number of adults being prescribed antidepressants at this time.
U.S. suicide rates have risen sharply in recent decades, a trend that likely continues during the pandemic. Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard, told the New York Times: “We’ve never had anything like this — and we know social isolation is related to suicide.”
And while the world stresses and often shames people into mask wearing and social distancing, a lack of understanding dominates these dictums regardless of whether they are necessary behaviors. Conversely, wartime promoted social connection.
Without the balm of understanding and empathy, insidious disconnection develops on a higher level. The greatest and most dangerous sacrifice at any time is separation and isolation.
Our very human condition has been severely ruptured and compromised. The ability to take getaway trips, to work out in a gym, to partake in a group training or go to church, a meeting, to work or school. All this has upended life as we have known it. The shock and loss are immense.
Children, teens and young adults especially suffer from this lack of essential contact.
The need to relate in person is age old: To partake in the marketplace, to sit around a campfire, to have chats in a cafe, to invite a stranger into a conversation. These are not fancy expectations or desires, simply typical ways in which humans relate, share, give and receive love and kindness through in-person daily exchanges.
Making wiser connections
This is not the time to take a stiff-upper-lip approach, at least not in the old-fashioned way.
As hugs are not recommended outside the home and touching elbows for now is the new “norm,” it is important to work on developing a deeper sense of how to connect — providing compassion for the everyday losses experienced.
Now is the time to collectively grieve, to recognize the depth of painful losses. To share our fears intimately. Now is the time to find ways to adjust and adapt until we are through the worst. Now is the time to find ways to manage depression and anxiety — realizing people are not alone in these overwhelming traumatic times.
This is a shared path on which loss needs to be acknowledged openly, and loneliness understood, realizing people need one another in ways that perhaps had been taken for granted.
Say hello to your neighbor when glimpsed through a window, or offer a how-are-you wave to pedestrians across the street — it means so much these days.
Maintain physical social interactions when possible. When not, reach out via Zoom or phones or Skype.
One day we will be hugging one another again. Meanwhile, commit to ways to hug ourselves and those we can hug. Include teddy bears and our live animals, for they need hugs too.
Mindful awareness of self-care, combating isolation as its own virus, knowing this to be a dangerous thing when prolonged.
There can never be enough love in our lives, so reach out in all the ways permitted. For there will never be another time as this. Looking back, much may well have been learned and gained.
More help with Covid-19 mental health: