Page 40 - Total War on PTSD

Doctors around the globe are reporting both new anxieties among existing patients, and relapses among former ones. As a mental health counselor, I have observed many individuals who do not have access to adequate social situations or have family members who are not accommodating toward them. This results in more anxiety which forces them to relapse and turn to drugs and alcohol to self-medicate during this time of need. While normally, these individuals would turn to social interaction and meetup groups to help alleviate their symptoms, they are relegated to Zoom and Skype sessions. I have found that Skype and Zoom counseling sessions only exacerbate their already heightened anxiety or nervousness in social situations.
Additionally, COVID-19 has increased Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which was already on a rise before this pandemic. GAD involves an abnormally preeminent response to everyday challenges like qualms over money, work goals, and child-rearing or lack of child-care. Not everyone can work from home and those who can’t are worrying about whether they can pay the bills, or if they are losing their jobs for good. For people with GAD, those common woes produce incapacitating anguish, and coronavirus is surely having a larger impact on such individuals. The worry becomes, ‘How do I pay my bills? What if I lose my job? What if I lose my car or home?' (Kluger, 2020). Because many anxiety disorders are based on hypotheticals, as this is a time of extreme uncertainty these disorders are already elevated additionally by the “worst-case scenario” thinking our brains can formulate under extreme duress.
Experts warn that but it may be too early in the coronavirus plague to know the exact extent to which anxiety disorders are on the rise, because the clinical cases are lost in the sense of global panic in the media.
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