“Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her. These are not the worried well. They are people in crisis.
Depression and Anxiety Are at All-Time Highs
According to the most recent Household Pulse Survey,[2] conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 27.3% of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety, and that’s in addition to the 40 million Americans who report substance use disorders[3] and the 14 million who have more serious mental illnesses.[4]“There are about 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S.[5] By my back-of-the-napkin math, if all of us were treating only people with depression or anxiety, each of us would have to see more than 3,000 patients a year,” Drake notes.[6]In short, there aren’t enough practicing psychiatrists to handle the burgeoning tsunami of mentally unwell Americans. There also aren’t enough residency positions available to significantly expand the profession any time soon.
The Price of Fearmongering
While Drake doesn’t go into the causes behind the mental health crisis, it’s fairly obvious that this is the price society is paying for our government’s ill-conceived and irrational pandemic measures and the nonstop fearmongering. NPR contributor Kat Lonsdorf describes the constant fear of kidney transplant patient Jullie Hoggan:[7]“While the surgery was successful and Hoggan is now vaccinated and boosted, she is still severely immunocompromised and has to take significant safety measures.
A Nebulous and Hard-to-Define Trauma
As noted by Lonsdorf, trauma typically involves some kind of life-threatening event or something that leaves you feeling fearful and/or helpless. Many who have religiously followed mainstream news over the past two years have clearly been traumatized, feeling as though death is imminent and there’s no escape. The death-dealing blow — in the form of an invisible virus — could come from anyone, including loved ones. No one was “safe” to be around.What’s more, the pandemic wasn’t an isolated incident that could be processed and recovered from. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist with expertise in collective trauma, likens the pandemic to a “slow-moving disaster” that “escalated in intensity over time” — and to this day doesn’t have a clear endpoint.[8]
Not everyone agrees that what we’re seeing is the result of collective trauma, though. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score” — one of the most-sold books on Amazon during the pandemic — is hesitant to categorize the pandemic as a collective trauma.
Officials Are Unwilling to Let Go of the Fearmongering
Whatever we end up calling it, it’s clear that our government’s and media’s response to the pandemic has been a key causative factor behind this mental health crisis. It’s also notable that even though COVID-19 has become endemic in most parts of the world, causing few deaths, the pandemic has not officially been declared “over.”In early March 2022, the World Health Organization said discussions about when and how to declare an end to the pandemic were underway, but that “we are not there yet.”[10][11][12]
In the U.S., July 15, 2022, the CDC extended for another 90 days the public health emergency that’s been in effect since the pandemic began.
In alternative media circles, fear of the virus has been tempered by more clearheaded analyses of statistics and data, showing that the real-world risk is actually quite limited, and that there are highly effective early treatments available even if you do get infected.
My guess is that those who now, two years in, are still struggling with overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety about the virus are the ones who for whatever reason weren’t exposed to these comforting data, or chose to dismiss them (which is what mainstream media told them to do).
Truth Is a Big Part of the Remedy
This fearmongering is again based on the lie that the PCR test can identify an active infection (it can’t), and the false idea that asymptomatic spread is a driver of infection (it’s not). Time magazine also promotes the false idea that the COVID shot is “extremely effective at preventing severe disease” and that Omicron causes milder symptoms only in “healthy, vaccinated people,” even though real-world data suggest otherwise on both accounts.There’s no mention of the fact that the COVID shots may be responsible for more than 1.2 million injuries[15] and are, by any metric, the most dangerous drugs ever to be released. There’s also no mention of the fact that most people are likely immune to Xe at this point, as it arose right on the heels of a major Omicron surge.
Even questions about remasking have popped up again. “Is It Time to Start Masking Again?” The Atlantic asked April 8, 2022.[16] According to The Atlantic, in the face of new variants, we ought to prepare “by having good masks on hand — and being mentally ready to put them on again.”
Totalitarianism Is Built Through Fear
Let’s face it, they need us to be fearful because, otherwise, they know we won’t comply with what’s coming next.For The Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution to come to pass, the great masses must be willing to give up their freedoms and submit to more invasive surveillance and control, and for that, their fear of imminent death must eclipse all other concerns.
The good news is about half the population (in my estimation) have worked their way through the propaganda and no longer fret unnecessarily. Around the U.S., people are standing up to tyrannical and irrational COVID measures, be it mask and vaccine mandates or inhumane COVID rules in the hospitals.
Be a Role Model
There are no simple answers to the mental health crisis facing us, but putting an end to unnecessary fearmongering, I think, is a task that needs to be shouldered by those who still chose to work in mainstream media. On an individual level, it may mean shutting off MSM news altogether.Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or who have worked our way out of it) can also act as a lifeline to untold numbers of people by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we go about our lives.
Don’t wear a mask to appease people’s fears. Let people see you smile. Be friendly and optimistic when in public. You never know how seeing you enjoy life might benefit someone who feels the world has become an unsafe and scary place.
In the long term, we need additional solutions — we need more qualified psychiatrists and therapists, for example — but in the meantime, we must do what we can, on an individual level, to ease the collective pressure, and we can begin by simply demonstrating that a different reality is possible.
The collective has been squeezed, mangled and brought to the precipice by a few in power. Many have been broken down in this process. It’s now time for the rest of us to take the reins and steward our fellow humans back to reality, back to sanity, by being firm yet kind, principled, ethical, truthful, rational and optimistic.
