How Covid Scares stories is hurting our mental health. Is it worse then covid ? Are they covering up suicides?
MY wonderful great aunty Cecilia – the matriarch on my dad’s side of the family, who I adored – died of Covid-19 in a Lancashire care home on Saturday, aged 87.
Severe dementia meant this great lady, who survived World War Two before living a modest moral life as a family-focused Catholic, was blissfully unaware of the fact she spent her final three months on earth without seeing any family members in person.
However, the indignity of the coronavirus restrictions banning her two sons and beloved grandson from being in the room to hold her hand as she faced her final moments — thankfully with exemplary care workers — is a trauma for the entire family.
There is a seven-year-old, whose life I am closely involved in, who has started to wet the bed and is now in therapy because they are so terrified of Covid, having been forced to isolate at home for two weeks after one of their classmates tested positive. An unimaginable cruelty for a fragile youngster.
Also a close friend, who has long battled mental health problems, had an OCD explosion thanks to Lockdown II and now finds it difficult to leave the house at all.
One pal has seen their long-dormant eating disorder come to the fore, while another has been forced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous as their lockdown drinking became uncontrollable.
I don’t expect any of these stories to shock you. Quite the opposite.
It’s highly likely you can share an equal number of tales of pain, heartache and psychological damage, stories of how the people you love have seen their lives blighted by lockdown.
Or perhaps you are personally feeling the mental health consequences from nine months of a global pandemic that has dominated our consciousness thanks to public health campaigns amplified by a compliant broadcast media throughout 2020.
That is understandable too — most of us are. After all, our lives have been changed in ways we could not have imagined when this virus first reared its ugly head in Wuhan, following a despicable cover-up by the Chinese communist government.
Personally, I veer from anger that we are in this situation at all, and frustration that most of our leaders refuse to acknowledge the real cost of shutting down the country, to fear that it might be years before I see my mum, dad and sister in New Zealand again.
Our leaders need to be acutely aware of that as they continue with their almost daily press conferences of gloom, without even a glimmer of light at the end of a very long tunnel.
Dan Wootton
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