Bracing for the mental fallout from the pandemic

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher
Young Adults, Clarion Herald

January brings new hopes, new possibilities, a desire for change. It’s the start of a new year, and anticipation over what’s to come has us yearning for difference.

But is that the case?

Our university maintained its original start date – the week before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. In the first week, just about half of my students e-mailed with positive COVID results. In my department, about a quarter of my colleagues were in quarantine either for themselves or with their children.

Teaching to a classroom that is half full of masked students presents its own challenges. It’s difficult to read the room. It’s more difficult trying to engage in conversation and lead discussion when everyone is wondering the same thing: Where’s the rest of the class? How long before I, too, become exposed and enter quarantine?

As a parent of three children unable to be vaccinated due to their age, there’s added pressure. We wait cautiously each morning for a text from the daycare: Has there been an exposure? Will the children have a place to go?

In addition to the very real concerns about young children falling ill with COVID-19 and the uncertainty surrounding the long-term effects of the illness and the possibility of “Long COVID,” there are anxieties about uncertainty and disruption. What does that do our psyche? To our sense of time and planning? To the ways in which we conceive of adaptability?

As I plan for my classes, I also try to keep detailed notes about who’s missing class due to quarantine. Eventually, they’ll need to drop by my office to make up their work. That’s in addition to the days that I have to take off and reassign the day’s work to a virtual environment or reassess the schedule because I need to be home with my children while we await potential exposure.

We are living in a time of increased disruption. Our sense of what’s normal has forever been altered.

We see the memes making fun of the Renaissance paintings. Having now lived through a pandemic, we understand why the models in those paintings are painted lounging – naked and voluptuously.

But aside from the humor – what else can we learn about the culture? About the changes that needed to take place after living for multiple years in a state of increased exposure, illness, uncertainty and anxiety?

These are the questions we should be asking: What is the physical and psychological toll of the environment in which we’re living?

COVID-19, like the flu and other pandemics before it, will be here to stay. What gets forgotten is that the flu was a multi-year crisis, beginning in 1918 and becoming endemic in 1920. We hope for that, too. We yearn for a time without masks, quarantine or social distancing.

And, until that time comes, we must prepare ourselves for the toll that these past two years have taken and adapt to those changes.

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