![]() “With population-wide trauma, a war or a terrorist attack, we heal socially,” says Kohrt. ‘One of the most diabolical things about this pandemic is the on and on-ness of it all’: author Amanda Ripley ![]() They had experienced prior disasters, but these approaches could be just as beneficial in high-resource places like the US and UK,” he tells me, and I can’t help wondering, do we in the Global North think of ourselves with such superiority that we find it hard to learn from the experiences of the Global South? “Many low- and middle-income countries, like South Africa, India and Uganda, immediately rolled out mental health and psychosocial plans in February, March and April 2020. “There’s a tremendous amount we can learn from how we’ve responded to previous emergencies,” say Dr Brandon Kohrt, professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, who works in Liberia, Uganda and Nepal, dealing with the mental health aftermath of everything from Ebola to earthquakes. “Humans can withstand a lot of turmoil and instability if they can recover.” Prior to Covid, Ripley studied people who survived tornadoes and terror attacks, emergencies for which the mental health consequences are much better understood than the long, slow-burn, seemingly endless one we find ourselves living through.Īs Ripley knows, this is not the first disaster humans have had to live through, so are there things we can learn from other disasters about what they do to our brains, relationships and communities? And, more importantly, how to make things better? “One of the most diabolical things about this pandemic is the on and on-ness of it all,” says Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. I developed a chronic reflux cough and, on more than one occasion, got into such an irrational spiral about it being Covid that I had to book a PCR test just to be able to function. My stomach churned and my hands shook so badly I had to give up caffeine. I couldn’t get to sleep and when I finally did, I had nightmares. ![]() A dire winter was coming and any respite we’d had over the summer felt like it was slipping away. ![]() I’ve always been anxious, but thanks to the pandemic, I developed debilitating health anxiety. It was October 2020 when I realised I was going to have to ask for help. ![]()
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