To think there's a whole mental health aftermath to the pandemic which isn't really being addressed

[crackerscandycanes]

Just looking at people I know, people seem to be really struggling at the minute, and of course the cost of living is a big part and all the bad news etc, but I also think that some of it is the aftermath of the pandemic and everything we had to go through being locked indoors for all that time. It seems as if we're not supposed to mention it now or reflect, but I think there's a lot of mental health issues on the back of it.

@SirMingeALot
@Oblomov22

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Oblomov22
SirMinge remind me, what did the Government promise? What did they say they were going to do to help young people?

The covid catch up funding. It's been inadequate.
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This was recognised back in June 2021 when the education tsar resigned over lack of support for schools.

news.sky.com/story/amp/covid-19-school-catch-up-tsar-quits-after-wanting-billions-more-in-funding-for-pandemic-recovery-package-12323335

Honestly it breaks my heart everyday to see school children suffering from the effects of the lockdown and the lack of funding. I have to accept that we simply have to do the best we can with what we have for as many children as possible. But it makes me want to cry knowing that some children will fall through the cracks or just need too much help that isn't available.

If anyone is interested, there's a COVID report that looked at social and psychological consequences through the population. I did the surveys throughout the pandemic, it was interesting reading knowing I was one of the data points!

www.covidsocialstudy.org/final-report

I was interested to see how compliances with rules changed along with government fuck ups, and the extra stress on women and those with pre-existing challenges like mental health conditions, financial hardship etc.

@PurpleWisteria1

Funnily enough, I was disappointed in people for the very OPPOSITE reasons you’ve stated here. Peer pressure at its finest

The whole pandemic could have been over in 2-3 months if the whole world had gone into strict lockdown at the same time and people that needed to work would have properly worm masks (not touching to adjust and refresh every two hours) and followed hygiene rules. But because peer pressure is not ok we now have many deaths, many mental health problems, a big recession looming, many fucked up childhoods et cetera.

Look at New Zealand. They shut everyone out, banning the virus for much of those teo years meaning that their lives went on as normal. Wouldn't you have rather had that the past two years?

I know lots of people with relatives (or themselves expats) in countries like this, who absolutely did not feel this was a good policy.

That is interesting.

On your point about extra stress and women etc, another good read is the inequality report the government had to be forced by the ICO to publish, back in December 2021. They tried to wriggle out of it- the ICO reasoning is worth looking at.

ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/decision-notices/2021/4018965/ic-78054-m7l2.pdf

The whole pandemic could have been over in 2-3 months if the whole world had gone into strict lockdown at the same time and people that needed to work would have properly worm masks (not touching to adjust and refresh every two hours) and followed hygiene rules.

No it couldn't. This is a ludicrous suggestion.

There are a billion people in the world in extreme poverty, how on earth do you suggest they were going to be able to lock down for 2-3 months when they're living hand to mouth? The structures weren't there to support it and couldn't possibly have been created in time. Lots of people don't even have proper toilets and clean running water, how could they possibly have followed hygiene rules? Do you think the whole planet is as rich and isolated as New Zealand?

The whole pandemic could have been over in 2-3 months if the whole world had gone into strict lockdown at the same time

Seriously? Have you had a cursory glance at what’s been happening in China over the last few years??

Every country was going to be exposed to covid regardless of lockdown. The only policy question was the balance between ‘infect’ and ‘inject’ and the timescales related to this. So yes some form of lockdown was necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed initially, and luckily vaccines were developed pretty quickly so the ‘inject’ side of things was able to progress at a rapid pace.

I went on a holiday I had a great time. I nursed people throughout the pandemic , most who I nursed were very elderly with terminal conditions and a very poor quality of life . They had COVID on their death certificates but were likely to die in the next few months of underlying disease. Pneumonia used to be called old man's friend.

I worked throughout the pandemic on different wards I was tested multiple times a week. I never caught it even after a holiday. Sorry I fancied a holiday after working throughout the entire thing while people sat on their arses.

I work in healthcare and was redeployed to ITU during the first and second wave

I've since left the NHS trust as I found it so traumatising after. I'd been there since I qualified (so a really long time)
The bleeps of the machines
Cpap noises etc all sent me into a cold sweat.

I honestly don't think I'll ever feel like me again. Dramatic to some maybe. But it honestly changed me
My role doesn't often have many dealings with palliative care, dead patients.
But during that time it was all i saw
We've never really been debriefed.

I still have nightmares too.
And certain songs from around that time make my stomach lurch.

Peedoffo I visited a Covid ward he day my husband died, and I had the greatest respect for the nurses.
Everyone who died was not extremely old and going to die soon and it didn't look to me like what I was seeing was in any way an "old man's friend".
This thread is upsetting me and enraging me which is why I think that a public acknowledgement of the effects on the nations mental health is not a good idea.
More resources to health and education would be a fantastic idea but we aren't going to get that.
Raking over traumatic things is not going to help at all.

I had a chat with a member of Sainsbury's staff when I was last shopping there. She said they were thousands of lines down on what they stocked before the pandemic.

I wasn't on furlough; DH and I worked throughout the pandemic. I quickly had to adapt to an entirely new system of WFH, meaning I had to tear up and rewrite the way I used to deliver my working materials previously. The additional workload was phenomenal. On top of this we were trying to home educate, and I was having to support (over the internet) a good many mentally distressed people whilst not being in the best place myself.

I spent my evenings and weekends working. The morale of my particular workforce isn't helped by the fact that we are being treated with contempt by senior management, who are praising us to the skies to our faces whilst decimating our jobs, not to mention the way in which we do them. We've been crippled by strike action since before lockdown, and it's making a significant dent in our salaries.

I haven't faced some of the devastating circumstances people are reporting on this thread and the last, cathartic one about the medium-term effects of the way the pandemic was handled. But I'm certainly suffering from burnout, have lost my passion and enthusiasm for my work, and have gone into survival mode. It's relentless, and all this time later I'm feeling no better.

Its shocking, I work in the NHS and managed to get some help as I have existing complex trauma and had a bit of a meltdown at one point but it was through a private company that does mental healthcare for NHS staff.
My patients have suffered terribly, we have elderly people whose adult children have died and they are all alone and all sorts.
Getting help is virtually impossible at the moment.

Wow just wow. All these months : years on and we still have people saying we should have had a ‘proper lockdown’
Wake up. Just please wake up. Stop eating the shit you are being served by MSM.
Masks don’t work. Vaccines don’t stop it spreading. Lies from every corner abound. People have been lied to and shunned by friends and family for not wanting to have the vaccine and now we are asked to forgive and to have a covid ‘amnesty’. Forgiving only works if the wrong doer admits they were wrong and apologies. Forgiving whilst you are still being wronged is just not how forgiveness works. Please wake up.

Vaccines stop deaths. They were never designed to stop the spread. Covid isn't a problem if it doesn't kill you or make you disabled.

I'm on the fence about the talking idea.

In one sense, it can be good to break the longstanding taboo relating to mental health issues, but in reality I'm getting no sense that this is actually happening. What we tend to hear is a lot of very privileged people/patrons of mental health charities pontificating about things they're ill-qualified to speak about. I sense these people are doing far more harm than good, as in some senses we can actually talk ourselves into a state of unhappiness and anxiety. There comes a point where trying to get on with life is all it's possible to do (this is appreciating that if you have depression this isn't possible, but not everyone with mental health issues is claiming to have depression).

On that point, whilst I can't speak for others, dosing up with anti-depressants has always had the opposite effect of helping me. The Citalopram group of drugs has a soporific effect on me and I can't function on the stuff without a 2-hour nap in the afternoon; a luxury I can't afford.

I can see that the fact we are all just expected to forget, to get on with it, to not acknowledge that the pandemic happened and has affected us, is problematic, but the brutal truth is we do now have to get back to something resembling a life. The 'keep stoic and carry on' approach might help in some ways to do this, otherwise the nation's mental health pandemic risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

@PurpleWisteria1

You wake up. The virus was in china in the beginning and the rest of the world was scrambling to "get our people out of there" and nobody stopped the flights or quarantined the people. If we had done that, how would the virus have spread then? No movement = no spread. People spread the virus, you don't get it from eating a banana.

I’m fine with talking about it. These threads are so much better than the ones during the pandemic where aggression and abuse tried to stop discussion.

If people want to avoid it that’s also fine.

I don't agree that it shouldn't be discussed because people died. The MH impact of the lockdowns should be acknowledged as well as the other impacts they had. I struggled, that doesn't mean I didn't care people died. Those are riduclous things to tie together. We can say one without meaning the other can't we?

It's well known now that the government used psychologists to ramp up the fear to make people comply.
They escalated the fear very effectively but haven't de-escalated it. This is why so many are still suffering with anxiety

I recall a conversation with a friend about exactly this, and us wondering how the govt would go about reversing what could only be described as mental programming; and as we can see, they didn't. Just 'OK, restrictions now eased and masks off, back to how you were, folks.'

How does this show that the entire planet could've locked down for 3 months and thus eradicated covid?

Thats right. They were never designed to stop the spread. So why then we’re we told during roll out that they did stop the spread? When I didn’t want mine, why was a I being called a granny killer and selfish? I’m a healthy 30 something. My risk was very low. It was my decision to make yet still, I was called selfish as I could have covid without knowing and spread it, but the vaccine could help stop that.
No. The vaccine didn’t stop the spread or stop you getting covid at all. They have admitted that now. But at the time that wasn’t the message being put forward.
Now you, and thousands others try to gas light people.

They didn’t act quick enough with people coming in. I’ll give you that.
However, it would have still come here regardless. And there would have been a huge wave at some point. Just maybe a couple of months later down the line.

In fairness to the vaccine messaging, they did stop spread, to a large degree, for the original variant and in the timeframe that was tested (a few months).

They were less efficacious over longer time periods and for other variants.

The messaging didn't adjust quickly enough I suppose, as that information came to light.

Studies have shown the vaccines did help stop the spread as well as lessen the impact of anyone who had it. eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/17/fact-check-covid-19-vaccines-protect-against-infection-transmission/6403678001/

Yes, there's a pretty fucking big gap between the spread could've been more effectively controlled earlier if different actions had been taken, and we could've eradicated the whole thing by the entire planet locking down for three months. The latter simply isn't possible.