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I love this article and have seen the effects of our lack of ability to be social over the last 18 months. I work as a mental health therapist and we have been inundated by people coming in for services for depression and anxiety due to the isolation caused by the pandemic. When working with people who have depression, you typically try to get them to engage in social activities, but what happens when you really can’t. I had days where I felt like an ineffective therapist because all I could do was validate people’s feelings of how this was anxiety provoking or how they wanted that ability to spend time with people face to face. We have seen that people within our clinic have had poorer outcomes than ever before and most of it has to do with exactly this. It’s interesting to think how “keeping people safe” in terms of their physical health has done quite the opposite when it comes to their mental health.

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So good to hear from you, Kayla! Thanks for reading and commenting. Yes, I have friends who struggle with anxiety and depression and not being able to interact with people was really hard on them. I don't know what the better way might have been, but I feel the way we did go about it is another sign of how we don't prioritize mental health.

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Very interesting! I have been having some concerns over the experience of isolation during the pandemic, and especially how people have become increasingly engaged with social media echo chambers and polarized news media. It’s concerning because without exposure to other viewpoints, and compassion the we learn from interacting with people face to face, I fear we are in a time of two “realities”. And what happens to society if people can no longer agree on norms or Truth? I wonder.

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J-Hall! Good to hear from you! Yes, I think when we only "engage" with people on social media or filtered through the news media, it's much easier to see those people as one-dimensional, not fully realized and complex human beings in the way we think of the people we interact with face-to-face. On top of that, when we're in times of stress, one of our responses is to over-simplify--see everything in black and white. I'm good and you're bad. In a state of fight-flight-freeze, there's no room for nuance and complexity and context. So, yeah, I think the pandemic did make those divides even worse than they were before and I'm not sure how we find our way back from that.

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