The Pandemic and Your Mental Health – Part I
Editor’s Note: This is a three-part article on The Pandemic and Your Mental Health. Should you experience any feelings of self-harm, please seek medical help.
It’s no wonder that we have been hearing more and more about mental health over the past two years. The pandemic not only threatened our physical health with concerns of contracting COVID-19, but it also threatened our mental health with thoughts of anxiety, worry, stress, and so much more.
Many of the strategies used to ensure that our physical health was/is preserved during the pandemic – separation, isolation, distancing – are huge risk factors in creating mental health issues. On top of that add in grief from losing loved ones because of COVID-19, fear, uncertainty, job loss or work-from-home/no contact with your peers, this has all created the perfect storm for an already anxious world to become even more anxious
Studies conducted over the course of the pandemic about mental health has unfortunately shown an increase in various areas including:
- 73% of healthcare providers feel their family’s life is at risk because of their job during the pandemic.
- 64% of people indicated feeling anxious in general because of the pandemic.
- 58% believe social distancing is a reason to be concerned about their mental health.
- 63% of students (in California) said they’d had a mental breakdown in the past year.
- Domestic violence incidents rose by 8.1% from 2020 to 2021 – though experts suggest this amount is more of a “floor than a ceiling” as many domestic violence incidents go unreported in the United States.
(Continued in Part II…)