Eric Wood, a mental health professional who runs virtual support groups for Indiana judges and attorneys, can look at a screen full of heads nodding in reaction to what someone said and know that the meeting is bringing some relief to participants who They have had problems during Covid. -19 pandemic.
Wood, who lives in Indianapolis, can also see how his wife, Diane Keller Wood, has made gradual improvements in her recovery from the significant effects of Covid on her physical and mental health.
“I was probably more of a therapist than a husband, but I would really try to get her to focus on the positives and not see everything through some sort of negative filter,” said Wood, a clinical case manager for the Child Assistance Program. Indiana Judges and Lawyers. “And then eventually she started coming home “from doctor’s appointments” saying, ‘You know, I think I’m getting better.'”
Still, Keller Wood and the legal scholars, like millions of other Americans, have not fully recovered from mental health problems related to the pandemic and the social upheaval surrounding it over the past two and a half years.
while there is are indications that, at least among American adults, rates of anxiety and depression have fallen from the peaks seen during the first year of the pandemic, are still higher than before Covid, and there are still not enough psychiatrists and therapists.
In short, while the pandemic is no longer the top story on the nightly news, its ripple effects remain top of mind for many Americans.
In addition to those who have died from covid or lost a loved one to the virus, “there are personal stressors that people have had to deal with, from time to time with restrictions on their activities, from time to time with the possibility of getting sick, and all of those things have now been chronic,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who described the pandemic as a “collective trauma.”
In 2019, 11% of adults in the United States reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. In January 2021, the number was 41%. A year later, it had fallen to 32%, which was still significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, the Lawyer Assistance Program operated monthly support groups for people struggling with issues like addiction or grief. When much of the country went into lockdown due to the virus, the organization launched a weekly program, Connection Group, to help people deal with isolation.
“We have some people in the group who identify as extroverts, and the pandemic was particularly difficult for them,” Wood said. “Working from home really changed her sense of activity with other people; conversations were cut off. Everything social had disappeared from their lives.”
But even once litigants started working in person again, their mental health issues didn’t evaporate, Wood said. In some cases, they got worse.
“When people started to go back to offices, lawyers in particular were starting to fall apart,” Wood said. “Substance use for many really got out of hand during that two-year period. Depressive disorders, also on the rise”.
Still, despite growing concerns and the novelty of meeting virtually, support groups seemed to work, Wood said. People who previously didn’t drive two hours to attend a support group can now do so from home.
The Connections group “has created its own kind of sense of community,” Wood said. “We’ve had people come in when a crisis was particularly relevant to them and then things calmed down and then they stopped coming to the group, but they really filled a need.”
Once Covid restrictions eased, Wood and her colleagues considered stopping the Connections group or meeting less frequently, but participants asked to keep the same hours.
After many people stopped worrying about covid, Diane Keller Wood, a hearing aid assistant, contracted the virus in February 2022, despite remaining vigilant about wearing masks.
And then he developed prolonged covid symptoms, including shortness of breath, fatigue, mental confusion, loss of balance, and eye twitching.
Nearly one in five American adults who have had COVID continued to have prolonged COVID symptoms in June, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Keller Wood has seen a long list of providers, including an otolaryngologist; a neurologist; a physical therapist; a psychiatrist; and an ophthalmologist.
For about a month, he experienced suicidal ideas, which are more common among people who have had Covid. according to a study held at Washington University in St Louis.
Keller Wood described it as “the worst despair you’ve ever been in, for no reason”.
“People with Covid-19 are unfortunately at a much higher risk of having mental health problems,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Washington, who has studied the impact of the virus and prolonged Covid on people’s mental health.
The psychiatrist prescribed Keller Wood a mood stabilizer, which “helped me tremendously,” he said.
Keller Wood also connected with a member of a Covid survivors support group who recommended she try the over-the-counter drugs Pepcid and Zyrtec, what studies have shown can help with some Covid symptoms. They helped ease Keller Wood’s brain fog, she said.
But some days, he still has trouble forming words.
“If I can have quality of life and see some improvement, I think I’ll still be positive, but I don’t know what my life will be like in 10 years,” she said.
Another challenge is the lack of therapists and psychiatrists. More than a quarter of the US population lives in an area where there is a shortage of mental health providers, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
To deal with the surge in mental health problems, “we need to be creative,” Al-Aly said. That could mean the health system setting up support groups and social workers to provide mental health care, he said.
“The government has to do a lot more, and also the public has to be aware of this and restore some social ties and restore some sense of normalcy of checking each other,” Al-Aly said.
Tim Bostwick, an opera singer and doctor of music candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is working on a creative solution to his post-traumatic stress disorder.
He had never had significant anxiety or depression before being hospitalized for covid in the spring of 2021 and developing prolonged covid symptoms. He also developed nodules on his vocal cords, which prevented him from singing for six months.
“Since I recovered from Cov, I’ve been waking up with nightmares almost every night, most of them in the hospital,” he said.
But her mental health has improved thanks to medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. And now she’s working with a service dog organization to train her mini Aussiedoodle, Lift.
In public, Bostwick used to panic when he saw others without masks. Now Lift notices when his breathing pattern changes and kicks him with her paws.
“It helps me focus on something other than all the people around me not wearing masks,” he said. “That is not my responsibility. I really can’t deal with it. But I have to try to address my own psychological problem.”
Now he is preparing to perform for the first time since the pandemic began. She will be singing at La Jetée at the Chicago Fringe Opera.
“Losing my voice… it was like losing an old friend, and we are not the same. We will never be the same. There is no going back to normal,” he said. “But it’s like meeting an old friend again.”
