General Health Tips & News


Mental Health Support Amidst the Corona-virus Pandemic


By M.M. (staff writer) , published on January 25, 2021



Medicine Telehealth Health Mental Health Covid-19


Mental Health Support Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic

The covid-19 pandemic has exerted a lot of pressure on public mental health in the world. As we speak, there is a need for every country to provide a guide to mental health response everywhere in the world. The first people to be affected mentally are the general public. The other group are the health workers in the frontline fighting the pandemic. So how are these two groups affected mentally and how should they be supported.

 

General public

When the virus started to spread all over the world, different governments started warning the public about the virus and issuing lockdown orders. With all this, fear and anxiety spread like wildfire among people. So many questions were being asked and there was no one to answer. There were so much negativity and fear about COVID which led to a lot of anxiety and fear. To help alleviate these and many other mental health issues, public awareness had to be done. This was done in a bid to inform the general public about COVID and its implications.

While so much wrong information was spread around, there was a lot of stigma created around the virus. The public had to be educated about the virus, how it is spread, the symptoms and much more.

 

Health Workers

These are the people who put their lives at risk treating people with this highly infectious disease. They are at a higher risk of mental consequences as a direct result of providing care to COVID-19 patients. The stress, pressure, and anxiety in their line of work are tremendous.

The healthcare workers are struggling with the anxiety of potentially infecting their families and getting infected. This puts a lot of pressure on doctors and other healthcare workers. to address this, doctors were advised to first have a self-decontamination routine. This helped relieve them of that concern. However, this wasn’t the only challenge. Doctors and caregivers had to struggle with worrying about not having enough PPE and seeing firsthand the impact of the coronavirus to their colleagues and patients. To help relieve these and many other concerns, those in the frontline were advised to come up with different ways to help relieve stress. The first was trying to talk it out within the institution. If this wasn’t enough, visiting a psychologist is also an option.

The virus is not gone but today, we have a vaccine to help combat it. This means less stress and concern for the public and health workers. Technology like telemedicine however has proved to be a very useful tool in case of such a pandemic. Institutions are now encouraged to embrace the technology and utilize it in healthcare as much as possible.

 

References:

  1. https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-020-00621-z

       2. https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/how-covid-19-s-affecting-mental-health-women-physicians

       3. https://intjem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12245-020-00299-5




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