Everything is awesome. Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
Back in the middle of March, I was pretty stressed out. Funnily enough it was the handwashing that got me; this was a few days before lockdown, and the real public health message had been wash your hands. So I washed them, dozens of times a day. My hands were raw and cracked, sometimes to the point of bleeding. They itched — burned — constantly. I was at every moment aware of this burning sensation, and it was an ever-present, unignorable reminder of how the world had changed.
My six-year-old son’s hands were red and raw too, from his conscientious efforts at washing his hands at school. He would proudly tell me that his teacher had said he was the best hand-washer in his class, and it broke my heart even as I praised him for it. I’m not an anxious or depressive person, and I’m not usually stressed. But the coronavirus pandemic — the uncertainty, the fear, and the god-damn handwashing — got to me.
It’s easier now: you get into routines, the weird becomes normal; plus I started to backslide a bit on the handwashing, once they shifted the emphasis to social distancing. But, for a while, I could feel myself struggling.
So when people say that Covid-19 is bringing with it a secondary epidemic of mental health problems, I can easily believe it. I can believe it because I could see how tough being out of school was on my kids, and because I heard other people saying the same; and because we were all well-off people of privilege, so I could only imagine that it was worse for others. I can believe it because I know so many people who went from being full-time workers to full-time workers and full-time parents and educators. It’s a bloody stressful time.
Mental health matters. If people are suffering significant mental health impacts because of coronavirus, or because of the lockdown, then we need to know, because that will affect the correct way to respond, personally and as a society. We need to honestly address the trade-offs, the costs and benefits, of the policies our country takes to minimise the damage of the virus.
That means that research into the mental health impact is important — and there’s lots of research going on. The trouble is that, just as in so much of science at the moment, everything has to happen fast. That’s understandable, but it can cause real problems.
Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, told me that “there’s a lot of scrabbling around to do research on the wider effects of Covid. Not just in psych. And it comes from a good place; people want to help and do something useful.” But, he says, we need to be extraordinarily careful. “When there’s stuff going out there that either has the aim of, or has an impact on, policy decisions, it has a real potential to have a big impact on people’s lives.”
Careless science can lead to wrong conclusions amazingly easily. Psychology has learnt that lesson more harshly than most disciplines, having suffered huge and embarrassing setbacks during the “replication crisis”. What it has discovered is that some precautions are vital. Some of these are slightly technical-sounding but important, such as preregistration of hypotheses, and committing to publishing regardless of the results, which avoid innocent and deliberate statistical malpractice. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s vital to share your data and methods, so other researchers can check your work.
I want to flag two papers looking at Covid and mental health, each with very different approaches to how you do science, to show you what I mean. One of them came out in May, and was intended to establish the “validity” of a new measure that one of the authors had developed, a “fear of Covid-19” scale, back in March. The authors have since used it in further research.
The “validity” of a scientific measure is how well it applies to the real world. For instance, most research into smartphones and mental health has been carried out using one of several questionnaires which asked people about their phone use. But a study last year discovered that how much people thought they used their phones was only tangentially related to how much they actually used it, as recorded by a special app. So the phone-use scales are not very valid: they aren’t very accurate at measuring the thing they’re supposed to be measuring.
Validity is crucial in psychology, because so much of it is based on questionnaires and surveys. If I make a questionnaire to give to patients, and which then gives them a score, and that score is called their “suicidality score”, then it is really important that people who score highly on it are at higher risk of suicide than people with low scores.
It’s important because, if that scale is picked up, other people will do research using it. So they might do a trial of some antidepressant, and measure subjects’ suicidality scores on this scale before and after. Then, if the subjects’ scores improve, the authors can say “this drug improves scores on the Chivers Suicidality Scale by an average of 11 points”. And it might get picked up by NICE and given to patients by the NHS.
So, if the suicidality score is actually not valid, if it doesn’t relate to real-world outcomes, then it is worse than useless: it is directing resources and future research away from the places where they can do good.
That means the paper establishing the validity of the new “fear of Covid-19” scale is very important. The authors seemed to take it seriously, recruiting 8,500 Bangladeshi students to test it on. And, vitally, they said that “data will be available on request” if other researchers want to look at their findings.
But — disturbingly — they haven’t gone ahead with that. Another researcher, Brittany Davidson — one of the authors of the smartphone self-report validation study I mentioned earlier — asked them for the data several months ago. She had wanted to look at the data because, she says, she was wary of psychometric scales coming out with a “lack of rigour”, and she had questions over how the authors had managed to recruit such a huge sample size in a very short time, apparently without offering to pay the subjects anything; that is, she says, very unusual.
So far, none of the data has been forthcoming. This is really out of the ordinary, and worrying, especially since — as far as we can tell — the data is not sensitive. Researchers keeping data to themselves was a significant part of why the replication crisis got so bad. It’s especially bad when they say in the paper that they’ll share it.
You may feel this is all a bit technical and unimportant, but it’s not. The original “fear of Covid-19 scale” paper has more than 120 citations already. The validation paper was carried out in Bangladesh, but the authors have also created English, Turkish, Iranian, Spanish and other versions of the scale, in each of those languages. A small but non-negligible percentage of the research into the mental health impacts of Covid-19 is carried out using this scale.
And its authors make serious claims about those impacts: they say in one paper that Covid-19 has led to people “suffering from elevated anxiety, anger, confusion, and posttraumatic symptoms”, to “unusual sadness, fear, frustration, feelings of helplessness, loneliness, and nervousness”, and that in “extreme cases, it may trigger suicidal thoughts and attempts and, in some cases, actually result in suicide”. This is important, non-trivial stuff.
More than that: the authors use the scale to propose policies for national governments, such as banning and removing websites that host “misinformation (e.g., false COVID-19, treatment remedies, COVID-19 conspiracy theories)”, or having government health agencies “make online counseling sessions available to help ease the mental health concerns and worries of the general population”. It is very possible that, somewhere in the world, a government white paper will be written citing the “fear of Covid-19” scale as support for some policy or other. (Stranger things have happened.) And yet other researchers cannot look at it to see how it was validated.
(There are, I should note, other concerns with some of the research of one of the authors, some raised here by psychologist Dorothy Bishop and others here by the psychologist Nick Brown.)
As we said earlier, it seems obvious that Covid-19 is dragging a mental health crisis in its wake. It certainly seems obvious to me. So you might think it doesn’t really matter if some papers cut corners a bit in order to tell us things that we already know.
That’s why I wanted to bring up another piece of work, which seems to me an example of careful research in this fast-moving and scary topic. It looked at 800 adults living alone in the UK and USA, and measured their mental health on well-established, well-validated scales (the standard measures of depression, anxiety and loneliness).
The paper measured their responses at three points, one some time before the crisis had really taken off, and two after lockdown had started. Vitally, also, it was a “registered report”: that is, the authors said in advance what they were looking for, and the journal agreed to publish it as long as it was carried out according to its methods, regardless of its results. That rules out lots of the bad statistical practice that can distort science.
Just as the existence of a Covid-19 mental health crisis seemed obvious to me, it seemed obvious to the authors of this study, Dr Netta Weinstein of the University of Reading and Dr Thuy-Vy Nguyen of the University of Durham. They just assumed that it was true; so much so that they were only measuring them to look at other things, such as whether introverted people were coping better.
But to both authors’ surprise, they simply didn’t find any increase at all on any of the three scales. The average level of loneliness, anxiety and depression did not go up. It was — to me, and to the authors — a startling result.
It’s not the last word. There could be all sorts of reasons why it didn’t find any impact. Weinstein wondered if the study, looking at people living alone, missed the stress placed on families. Or it could be that depression, anxiety and loneliness aren’t the main things that went up. “We didn’t look at stress,” she says: “I can remember that moment when I realised I was a full-time mum and a full-time academic, that sense of panic, but I don’t think I felt depressed.”
But the point is: we would all have confidently predicted, like Nguyen and Weinstein, that lockdown would make people living alone more lonely, more anxious and more depressed. They didn’t find that. Psychological research is messy and hard; it demonstrates the importance of really good, careful science, especially in messy topics like psychology, and especially in fast-moving situations like this. “This is a good opportunity to practise all the stuff that came out of the replication crisis to make sure that the answers we get are the right ones,” says Etchells. Open data, preregistered hypotheses, well-validated scales: we know this stuff is important.
My stress levels have returned to normal now; partly that’s routine, partly it’s kids being back at school, partly it’s my hands being back to their usual washing-up-liquid-advert softness. But the issues surrounding Covid-19 and mental health have not gone away; if nothing else, we can expect economic hardship and widespread unemployment in the coming years, and we know that is linked to mental health problems. Research into those issues will only get more important, to help mitigate those problems. But it needs to be good research. The lessons of the replication crisis need to be learned.
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SubscribeAnyone who shares this young author’s compulsion to wash their hands to the point of bleeding might take comfort from the Office For National Statistics chart “Characteristics of those dying from COVID-19” showing the age specific mortality rates in May.
Link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peop…
(apologies – Disqus “link” formatting failed with the link)
In short, if you are under 50, the mortality rate is so low that it doesn’t register on the chart. Between 50 and 65, your (i.e. my) age group is about 10% of all deaths. A teenager is 5 times more likely to be killed by lightning than by COVID-19.
We’ve spent about £640,000 per person (£320 billion divided by the estimated 500,000 deaths in the “do nothing” case). The great majority of avoided deaths are those who’s life expectancy at death was about 4-5 years. Many of those years are of comparatively low quality, in the sense used in health care economics.
That expenditure level is some 4 times the £30,000 per year of quality life extension our health care system normally allocates to palliative treatment. The debt and unemployment this has created will be a very real cause of anxiety and depression for many in the coming decades.
I can’t help feeling that much of the death that will follow alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, and other diseases of poverty and despair will be the consequence of the distorted perception of risk that the media collectively produced.
I’d go so far as to coin a new term: “Phobogenesis” – death originating in fear itself.
There’s no Covid mental health crisis. The damage has been done by the hysterical and authoritian measures taken supposedly to fight the virus.
The fact that ‘the damage has been done …’, describes exactly why there is a mental health crisis. However it is caused, whether by false data, crap journalism, physical separation from friends, family – or simply ‘people’, are the important details to measure.
Also, this anti-social climate provides an opportunity to measure possiblle future effects of the enforced use of digital communications technology in conducting education, business, socialisation in general – because I have grave doubts, even in a non-covid future.
You have to apply intelligence. If you are washing your hands until they are raw then you’re creating an entrance for the virus through the normally impermeable skin. I stopped reading the article at this point.
Agree. I’m no scientist and flunked it at school but I wouldn’t wash my hands till they bled. Isn’t that a bit…OCD?
A big thing that has been mostly missed by the secure, comfortable upper-middle classes who disproportionately write articles and waste time on Twitter, is that there are millions of people who’ve lost their incomes, whether through redundancy or through not having any clients. That has been the main cause of increase in depression and anxiety for me.
Like the author, I have children at home. We’re in WhatsApp groups. I can confirm, without any scientist’s help, that the draconian measures brought in to combat the spread of Covid-19 is creating a mental health crisis. The stress is palpable. As an example, my Year 3 has had a ‘lockdown’ birthday. These last 3+ months have taken their toll in him. Whilst a lot of time has been given over to the loss of education, from my untrained eye, the biggest issue is the lack of social interaction (i.e. play) that social distancing has imposed on the 5 to 11 age range. This has become an ever more irritating issue as the real data, published by the ONS, has shown that the original models created by Imperial College and based on influenza, were wrong. There had to be a starting point on which to base decisions but, any scientist must be prepared to say ‘sorry, we weren’t quite right with our initial hypothesis’.
It’s not the disease, it’s the so-called cure that’s the problem.
It has had a tremendous impact on mental health. It has enabled mindless herd behavior on a scale never witnessed before.
The interesting question this raises for me is just how valid is all the research of the last few years showing alarming increases in mental ill-health generally. I think it’s true, but if a) most people do and b) there are a lot more people looking for the evidence and c) there are a lot of people with a vested interest in it being true, maybe we’ve just created a non-existent mental health crisis. Maybe people are just more open now about their states of mind than they were say 50 years ago. And maybe also, people just expect today to be happy in a way that we once did not.
“just how valid is all the research”
Full stop.
Look no further than Sokal Squared.
Neither Sokal Squared nor the original Sokal hoax had anything to do with psychological or other scientific research.
I live alone so I was not particularly lonely. It was the choice being taken away from me as to when and where I could go out. I was stuck in Spain where the lockdown was very strict and in a one bedroom flat opening straight on to the street. If I had been in a big house with a garden and land surrounding me, like many of my friends, then I would have been fine. As it was I made every opportunity to go where I could go as much as possible – supermarkets which I normally hate, the petrol station, the chemist, the ATM machine, plus I went every day to walk a dog for a disabled friend. The worst is now because I suffer from panic attacks and I cannot wear a mask. So far I have been able to wear a visor and dash in and out of shops to get the basics that I need, but now it is mandatory to wear them everywhere and I am having a problem with that. I was in a Carrefour and had to leave because I could feel the panic coming on (wearing a visor) and I must have looked dreadful because the check out lady asked if I were alright, called security and they fetched me a wheelchair! I do feel that this is unnecessary – at the moment there are just over 300 live cases in Andalucia and 8.5 million residents. It is hardly any risk at all and I don’t generally speaking go near to people that I don’t know. I think that it is a policy to find out how easily the population can be controlled and the answer to that, so far is, very easily.
It would be good if someone could look at the mental health positives coming out of the Lockdown. There is no cloud without a silver lining. My son’s job is in a creative industry. Lots of research, writing, some meetings and, at the end of the project, some practical work that cannot be done from home. But the rest can. Previously, he battled through a two hour daily commute to do this job from an office. Since March he has obviously been working from home. He says he gets twice as much done without the office distractions. He can join his family for lunch, which recharges him. In the evening he’s there to do the bath and bedtime routine he almost always missed before. My daughter in law feels less lonely and more supported having him there. Their relationship is better. My grandsons are both flourishing and progressing at speed. My older grandson has gone back to school but complains that it is dull compared with Mum and Dad School and he is learning less. When I finally saw them again at the start of June, they had a glow about them I had never seen before – a genuinely happy family. And they cannot be the only ones. Forcing him back to office work to save W H Smith, Pret a Manger and the train companies is NOT the answer. We shouldn’t be trying to go back to the way things were but use this as an opportunity to explore new ways of living. Our whole society needs a better work life balance. Old folks homes – those terrible waiting rooms for death – need a complete rethink too.
According to the UN about an extra 80,000,000 people will die in the 3rd world due to the economic knock on affects. The suicide rate is 10 times the COVID death rate where I live. The question is not worth debating.
If you’re in business and watching your life’s work being flushed down the toilet due to some exaggerated risk, propagated by the selfish one sided media then you’d know there’s a mental health crisis. You’d know that there are huge mental health problems that are being experienced disproportionately across the community. And you’d know and you’re going to find out anyhow whether you know or not, that the real mental health problems will come next year and the years thereafter when the economic downturn tsunami hits almost everyone. In the USA I believe the figure is an extra 50,000 deaths per year for every 1 % of unemployment. That’s another 800,000 deaths. This whole lock down ‘religion’ makes no sense no matter which way you look at it..
Given what we know right now, any type of lock down in my opinion will turn out to be a crime against humanity.
As usual – great stuff from Tom
As a scientific layman but with acute interest in science – I have always found some approaches in the field of psychology utterly baffling.
Given that we know 100% of the placebo effect and of psycho-schematic tendencies of people especially in mental health – i find it baffling that the approach always seems to announce it from the rooftops and tell people about conditions so explicitly.
We see it in detail where children are routinely told that they may have mental condition A or B. As a result their approach to life and behaviour, both physical and mental can only be affected by that knowledge. Anecdotally I have unfortunately come across a number of adults who put every misdemeanor or issue they have down to the “anxiety” or other mental health issues, seemingly absolving them of responsibility.
Now most certainly not suggesting that there are not widespread and serious mental health issues that make life miserable for many many people – that is absurd – but I find it odd that these labels seemingly get handed out to people very casually and things become self-fulfilling.
As Tom says – you really need to be careful on people’s mental health
Couldn’t agree more. The issue of placebos is the other side of that coin, and a very interesting moral dilemma.
Well, as a believer in science and psychology, I urge you to take a good look at Amnesty International’s definition of “psychological torture of prisoners” and see how many times this government has inflicted exactly those same tactics on its own citizens. You will be astounded.
Did anyone, including Tom Chivers go and read the testing group data from the Royal Society study he references?
The authors excluded anyone under 35 and explicitly weighted the study to those over 65.
That’s fine in a vacuum, but we should expect to see higher negative consequences from enforced social isolation among the young, not among the old (who have more established social habits, particularly if they are intentionally living alone, and are typically more financially stable).
There also probably needs to be an acknowledgement of the likely impact of selection bias and it’s possible impact among those who voluntarily took the test.
—
To me, results of that study are pretty irrelevant.
At best all of psychology is pseudo science. Diagnosis is voted on by Psychiatrists who have biases (political or whatever) 50 years ago trans people were mentally ill, now apparently men (toxic masculinity) are mentally ill according to the American Psychiatric association, its all nonsense.
Even if you accept the diagnoses as you have mentioned the data to make the diagnosis is largely questionnaire based and that brings in the patients bias and the practitioners bias, and experts do have bias for example judges were found to give out harsher sentences before lunch.
It goes on, treatments are rarely objectively proven to be effective most of the time they are decided once more through questionnaires by busy psychiatrists who are pushing particular drugs.
and then of course replication which means just that this appears to work here doesn’t mean for one second that it will work somewhere else with different clinicians etc.
What is most worrying is when you hear the left calling to defund the police and you dig down a little into what they want to replace them with and they say well what we mean is we want more social work/mental health workers instead…
We really should take the whole field of psychology with a massive bucket of salt but instead we let people’s liberty be removed from them and even allow treatments to be forced on them based on very little actual objective proof of anything.
Wearing masks in shops will be upsetting.
I could cope pretty well with three months or so of Lockdown, but masking-up feels like we are going backwards.
That’s because we are, David. If one more person tells me ‘lockdown is easing’, I think I’ll scream. If the government want us to wear masks they a/should specify ‘masks’ not just face coverings ie bits of mucky old cloth, and b/ should provide us with the masks and proper instructions for their use. Most material masks or DIY dust masks along with bits of cloth are useless germ factories, which suggests to me this is nothing more than a gesture aimed at looking like they’re doing something in order to appease the panickers and get us out there spending our money. I fear it may well have the opposite effect for many. My world will close back down on the 24th just as it was opening up. My money stays in my purse.
I prefer to wear a mask and be able to go somewhere.At least the shops are open. I live in France and masks have been obligatory in most places since May 11 (public transport, banks, public buildings, hair&beauty etc). Most shops require them. It is at the discretion of the shopkeeper/owner. It will probably become obligatory.in France too.
Well, I am experiencing higher levels of stress and anxiety, especially today after the latest announcement.
Any study that comes up with a scale, validates it, uses it to carry out on a population AND then, after getting its results, promotes social policy to mitigate the effects it has “discovered”, is way over its head. Or should I write the authors are. Not having read the paper all sorts of red flags come up. Timing; too early to determine the effects of a phenomenon; population and whether it’s generally applicable; I could go on, but as a therapist and follower of the misfortunes of the “science “ of psychology, people! Be wary! There is too much trash out there and too many people trying to get published and be cited. There are thousands of scientific platforms that have no academic rigor, and there are lists of the credible ones and long lists of questionable ones. Validating a scale is not easy and them duplicating it in many languages and cultures also require validation! Nah! I can come up with all kinds of garbage and call it valid. Sure, it might be to me but so what! We are in the middle of the pandemic. We don’t know its Behavior, its capacity to mutate, treatments and vaccines. There is obviously the economic effect it has had on people who lost their income. On the other hand it increased the income of some professions, it shifted fortunes and lines between the haves and have nots. It quickly and quietly destroyed quite a large number of the older baby boomer cohort, bringing with it financial outcomes no one was expecting. It changed habits, but as you state, for how long?
I will not go on…i will finish with a personal pet peeve: we would have benefited , i think, from calling for physical distancing and social connection, be it via phone, visual platforms or even glass or plastic screens. It’s almost perverse that we all agreed collectively to replicate the meme “social distancing”. So damaging!
Keep your distance, but stay connected!
Interesting article.
As a psychotherapist with some free time and wanting to contribute during Covid-19, I signed up in March with a charity to offer brief support to front line workers which if the person wanted, could progress to (telephone) counselling.
There has surprisingly been much less uptake than envisioned over the past four months.
The coordinator proposed various theories including tiredness, perceptions of being (seen as) not coping or letting colleagues down as well as worries about it ‘going on my HR record’.
It is now (slowly) changing and this may be due to illness numbers being less acute and workers feeling more able to self care as a result.
….. Or perhaps the envisaged mental health tsunami will not happen because individuals have learned to more effectively manage their emotional health and well being.
So perhaps let us see what transpires in terms of actual demand for services before we as professionals start stressing ourselves out too much!
I don’t think there’s any doubt whatsoever that the lockdown is leading to a massive mental health crisis. Perhaps in addition to looking at psychological studies, more mundane areas of study such as labour need to be factored in. According to both Dr. David Katz and Dr. John Ioaniddis from Stanford University, there is an already existing body of scientific literature that links economic recessions to higher levels of depression, substance abuse, spousal abuse and suicide, particularly among men. The incidence of these adverse events is linked closely, almost lock-step, with the percentile of unemployment. Dr. Ioaniddis has stated that he expects “deaths of despair” and other downstream effects of lockdown “will be far worse than coronavirus.” In my community, which had zero COVID cases, my doctor tells me they have been swamped by patients suffering heightened anxiety and depression.
As a (now mostly retired) psychologist I totally agree. Indeed, I would raise a further point, which is that practices can acquire a sort of spurious validation by being taken up and spread until everyone thinks they’re right because they are what everyone is doing. This certainly seems to have happened with those prison-based “rehabilitation programmes” that actually made people worse (and may still be doing so). It is probably the case with many “therapies” for mental health problems that are completely unproven but have become widely accepted because, well, they have.
Psychology too often runs away with what seems like a good idea, despite that idea never having been properly tested. Often, these ideas have a “common sense” appeal, but that is not science. Anyway, if it were really that common, there’d be a lot more of it about…
“Is there a Covid mental health crises?”. YES THERE IS.. Anyone who believes this utter bullshit is mentally deficient. I’ve never witnessed such an abuse of science in all my life. The things they ask us to accept, (and believe) defies everything we learned in third grade biology class. Utter bloody nonsense..
Hear, hear!
Care to specify? I also cannot work out what side you’re arguing from your comment
My mother is 93 and lives alone. I visit her everyday. During the period of the lockdown her mental capacity has seriously deteriorated. She misses her friends and clearly their interaction with her kept her alert. As a scientist i am fully aware of this straw poll of one being not statistical valid but when i talk to care workers for the elderly it is clear my mother is not alone.
There is a type of science which i call ‘nintendo’ science. It is computer driven and therefore cheap. For the sample discussed in the article since it was collected during the lockdown it must have been collected online and therefore probably had a huge age bias since neither my mother nor her fiends have computer access. Perhaps the research merely shows that if you are ‘connected’ your mental health is not impaired. Perhaps you need to look at those who are isolated. For myself I am not suffering depression, anxiety and loneliness but my frustration is absolutely enormous!!
There are important differences, though, Dorian. For example, in those previous disagreements, the side of liberty was clearly dominant, and generally won through. But the side of liberty has grown progressively weaker and weaker, and now loses more often than it wins.
Another is that it is very different to argue that Pound shouldn’t win a prize given by a government he committed treason against, than to say that someone should be prohibited from using social media, which in the 21st century is the primary method of communication. The power of the tech barons to control speech according to their whims ought to terrify everyone.
Another thoughtfully written and timely article from Tom Chivers. Despite the rush to find answers and reduce suffering, which is understandable in the current circumstances, scientific integrity must be maintained when research is being conducted, particularly if important policy decisions are to be made on the basis of its findings. This is true both in the case of studies investigating the effects on mental health of the Covid-19 lockdown, and of those that may result from the BLM protests. Good scientific research, as pointed out in this article, can lead to surprising results that question received wisdom and lead to further enquiry. Bad, or poorly conducted science, on the other hand, can mislead and result in resources being wasted on ineffective measures that may do more harm than good.
I wasn’t at all surprised by the results of Weinstein and Thuy-Vy Nguyen’s study. People who live alone were no more lonely, anxious or depressed in lockdown than they were before; it made very little difference to their lives, since they were only popping out for a walk or to buy food anyway, and were used to being on their own most of the time.
I live on my own, but still work and enjoy an active social life with friends. It was taken away from me, mainly as my friends were too influenced by the hype in the media and the government and did not want to meet. I was not able to work as I work in hospitality. I am an introvert, but suffered greatly.
Um, I am living on my own not by choice, but because I’d come back to care for my mother, who died just before lockdown (I gave up a professional career to do so). My friends are mostly in the various countries in which I have lived, not here.
When I “popped out for a walk or to buy food”, it was as an NHS volunteer and as part of a local support group.
Those of us who live alone are not a homogenous mass.
Well said K R.
It was a badly designed study to look at those who live on their own and expect them all to have the same issues regarding the lockdown. I’m a widow, no children and gave up work some years ago to look after my mother. She died a short while after my husband did. I’ve had a few years to adapt to a life on my own … you do not keep that many friends when you give up work and care for an elderly parent.
The lockdown has had zero mental health problems for me, but I can imagine it would for some. Although I’m taken aback by where we have ended up as a nation thus far.
Odd that psychologists wouldn’t allow for that lack of homogeneity.
What does the expression “doing science” actually mean? Very little to nothing IMO.
Far too many journalists and polemicists and what-not are using the word “science” rather liberally to lend far too much dignity (I think, or presume) to whatever human activities are generally being described.
In science, if one is serious and credible, one does (amongst other things) “experiments”. Carefully designed, and legitimate (e.g. the experiment must be capable of a result inconsistent, or conflicting, with the associated hypothesis). And that is much easier said than done.
I think that the term “experiment” should be used far, far more often than “science”. But using “experiment” would also be like Warren Buffet’s quip about “finding out who had been swimming naked when the tide gets low”.
Almost noone in academia, for example, ever performs an “experiment”. Never during most academic careers. Most academic “ideas” are designed explicitly to be untestable. Otherwise there would be a lot of egg on a lot of faces.
Anyway, the topic of the essay seems also interesting but I just could not get over the (too) many uses of “science” within.
How to be a journalist:
1. Take a current issue (eg covid)
2 Pluck a possible consequence out of thin air (eg suicide)
3. Write an article supporting causal connection
4. Next consequence
5. If consequences exhausted then next issue
So tell me, is not covid causing more sightings of flashing green whales from Betelgeuse ?
Don’t mean come across as snide – but not sure you read the article correctly…
This article, while very useful, is missing an important piece of sociological context. As the cliodynamicist Peter Turchin explains, for example in his book Secular Cycles, the tumorous expansion of higher education is a form of credentialism that occurs at the point in a society’s secular cycle where it is suffering from severe elite overproduction. The elites are in too-great competition for positions, and so conspicuously “waste” resources in an attempt to gain advantages in securing such positions.
This period in the cycle, which comes shortly before the inevitable crisis and collapse, is also marked by a sharp rise in what we might call “non-jobs”, i.e., useless positions in elite institutions that exist purely to make room for more elites to sponge off the productive members of society. Corporate Diversity Managers and Professors of Critical Theory, anyone?
Yes of course, critical theory is the greatest refuge of lefty scoundrels. It’s current Professorial exponents are just aping their heroes, adorno for example, ponsing off and insulting the American taxpayer after accepting refuge from the Nazis and saving their lives…hideous waste of everybody’s tax pounds…
I like you can only speak for myself and observation of family. I retired due to stress from too much child protection etc, Unfortunately when you have had it bad enough to go off sick it doesn’t seem to take much to ramp back up the feeling of being stressed, BP raised ,bad sleep pattern, . My problem at the moment is I can’t understand why world renowned immunologists and virologists are being ignored and badly treated . I know some stuff from former colleagues still working have talked about is at odds with the official mantra..The longer just a few more weeks goes on the worse I feel. I have just been in the garden to find it didn’t soothe me like normal . Other people I know in family have had an increase in severity of their mental health issues
needing an increase in medication. We know for some mental health is one of the hardest areas for people to admit they need help. GP surgeries looking unwelcoming is no help.
The ‘disaster’ is the response to this relatively mild virus. Statistically under 70s have more chance of perishing from a road accident than from CV-19. But don’t let the facts deter you from bogus fearmongering.
Once psychologists get involved in anything, science itself necessarily takes a back seat.
Blair and Brown were woefully misguided on this project just like much of what they did. Much of the graduate education produced is of low quality and in areas not required. Graduate barista is not an appropriate profession but barista or other catering staff all properly apprenticed is appropriate. Many professions have changed into a graduate intake to stroke the ego of their current leadership of their lead bodies and again this is another gross waste.
I’m no spring chicken and consequently statistically more susceptible to this years “winter sniffles”, but rather than living in fear
of, or becoming despondent over “this years seasonal flu” I’ve applied
the wisdom of my years to immediately espy complete BS fear generation
from the get go, fueled by puppet mainstream media, and stoked by the
insidious taint of globalist marxism (together with a considerable dose of
individual incompetence) within the politcal puppet establishment. The
whole thing in a nutshell is a globalist powergrab, pure and simple.
Almost
everything that can be done to crush and destroy small independent
businesses is being done, meanwhile amazon et al are undoubtedly seeing
astronomical growth in revenue.
Lets “ease the economic fallout
we’ve generated with untold largesse”? Yeah great… all funded from
Rishak’s magic money tree (I.E globalist european and world central
banks.) thereby tying us ever tighter into the globalist web of
intrigue.
The only thing that’s causes me any of this “mental
health issues” bullsh!t is the acquiescence displayed the majority of our
once great nation’s unthinkers. THAT is the horrifying legacy for the
future, NOT this current bout of sniffles.
Well, good that you are evaluating the situation from a critical point. I suffer from stress, anxiety and loneliness greatly during these last nearly 5 months. I am finally going back to work in a coffee shop on Friday, although I look forward to the routine and seeing my regular and not regular customers again, today’s announcement has caused me a mild mental crisis. I am lucky enough to speak fluent German and not have to rely on British and American scientists tell me all these lies, I got my facts from Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and others, and I trust them. I have researched other voices, but they have not convinced me. I am disappointed that the British people who are opposed to the handling of this “crisis” and the curbs on our human rights imposed have not stood up and organised themselves. I have searched, but can only find vaccine and G5 conspiracists. I ahve an appointment at my surgery today, for sth minor else, which I will ignore and talk about my mental health instead. I am grateful for UnHerd, and I have Humankind, a brilliant book, and so relevant, it is scary!
So hopefully UnHerd will continue to look at this situation with a critical eye.
Es tut mir leid, was Sie durchmachen. Ich wünsche Ihnen viel Glück!
When Cromwell invited Jews to return to England (they had been expelled in1290), it was so the Dutch Jewish bankers could provide cheap credit for English commerce. So you could say that the Netherlands helped to seed their rivals.
It is also notable that political refugees (such as Locke) often chose to flee to the low countries.
A brillian and shocking book on this subject is ‘Children of the Cure- Missing Data, Lost Lives and Antidepressants by prof David Healy, Joanna le Nourey and Julie Wood
Comment removed – wrong article addressed.
I tend to the view that to call it a ‘mental health’ crisis is just plain wrong. Undoubtedly many people will have suffered short term stress and anxiety but we can only speculate that this will vary enormously depending on e.g if you are shielding and older, if you are a young ‘I’m invincible teenager’ , if you make good use of social media, FaceTime etc , if you’ve lost your job etc. But this stress isn’t really a mental health problem as such – being unhappy for a few months is not a mental health problem/ condition. There will, however, be those whose existing and diagnosed mental health esp anxiety and depression might have deteriorated although this is not a certainty . And there are those, people for whom the self isolation, stay at home and the general uncertainty might well,have been the straw the broke the camels back, the tipping point. There are also those for whom I have the greatest sympathies caught and for who I think we should concentrate a lot of attention I.e those trapped at home in a mentally, emotionally or physically abusive and tormented relationship.
For many of us though, and I am pretty sure it’s the majority, the worse thing we might have experienced is short term stress, anxiety and unhappiness. Not a mental health crisis
I think we’ll need to know the suicide rates and the violent crime statistics before we can say for sure whether there’s been a mental health crisis or not. If it turns out that more people have killed themselves over the past few months, then I’d say there’s a mental health crisis. The excess death numbers certainly exceed certified COVID deaths. COVID deaths to today, 44,968, excess deaths in June 63,000.
It is depressing that so much public money goes to researchers to mine our data and study us and so little to us. Maybe a 20-60% pay cut for researchers and policy makers living off taxpayers, and a substantial increase to funds going directly to families raising children. That would lift some depression, anxiety and low self-esteem in parents and kids, and correct some self-absorption and narcissism in academics. Academics who are parents may come out neutral.
Most articles appear to start with an assumption that a general increase in anxiety is a bad thing, something wrong or abnormal which must be stopped, addressed or medicated. There doesn’t appear to be any consideration that an increase in anxiety in response to significant real-world situations is actually quite reasonable, normal and may indeed be beneficial.
We’re not living in normal times, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, an event of exceptional rarity and impact. It’s the lead story of every news programme, it’s affecting our working and family lives and is likely to have significant effects for years to come. It would be remarkable for anyone living through this to be oblivious and not have some degree of anxiety about COVID-19.
But that anxiety within limits and properly channeled can be positive because it motivates people to take sensible precautions, to maintain social distancing, to be more careful about hygiene, to put on a face mask to protect themselves and others. Anxiety is a powerful motivator to protect oneself and one’s family from catching the virus and it’s these combined efforts which will ultimately stop its spread.
A lot of viral replication occurs in the mouth – where are the mouth sprays???
The point about privileged white kids protesting against 18th century slavery that they know all too well that they would have been slave-owners themselves if they had been alive 250 years ago. Throwing statues into rivers is a handy way of avoiding facing up to this fact.
It seems from this article, to demonstrate how fear is the main factor and the way different people deal with it.
It is the symptoms of fear, stress, obsessive hand washing among others that have to be learnt to deal with.
Resilience, some common sense and adherence to suggested precautions are ways to deal with fear, as is talking or discussing.
The author might just relate now, to the kind of stresses many working women, especially those on low waged jobs, have been subjected to as the main child carer, educator, cook, first aider, cleaner, food shopper and comforter for many years.
There are alternative ways to deal with such concerns and it is, as seen from the above unpaid ‘jobs’ mentioned above, alongside trying to earn enough to pay rent, food and clothe families that has undoubtedly led to much more mental health concern over the last 25 years, as the gap between incomes has widened, rents and mortgages out of control had proven to depress and lower self esteem of too many.
By supporting everyone to have an income of at least the average wage, not just a bread line existence that has led to more food banks and homelessness, it is a UBI Universal Basic Income – (read more at basicincome.org and follow the cross party group working on the idea) that will take away the fear and stresses of everyday living, restore self esteem as proven in other projects and give back choices to men and women, whether to work full time or part-time, home educate as many now enjoy, care for own children and/or parents, volunteer in the community (with learners from 14+ to help them develop useful skills and for CVs).
That would do away with much of the ‘science’ and investigation into what is going wrong in society – we are all trying and many being forced by their employere, to take on too much just to exist.
We have learnt from Covid19 where the essential work is needed – carers particularly on a so-called living wage are often paid between £8.50 and £9.00 an hour – more than those doing not so essential work and many in jobs they do not understand the need for.
We must re-think work and from Richard Curtis’s offer from half a dozen Multi £millionaires to pay more tax there is no real question of affordability. Not a present government concept? A very successful Candian project Dauphin, was set up by a Conservative Government and dismantled only when the Labour party won an election – another example of good ideas torn apart by divisive politically gaming parties.
“we were all well-off people of privilege” do you mean you were all born with silver spoons in your mouths and have just lived off your inheritance?
Being well off because you have worked hard to get to where you are DOES NOT make you privileged, it makes you the normal sort of person the country needs and you should be proud not ashamed.
There has also been a growth in pointless degrees in “made up” subjects which are of no practical use to any employer.
I hope they are this time. The death of “p-value” certified wishful thinking masquerading as science is long overdue.