Page 40 - Total War on PTSD

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.
There is also a huge sector of the population that is very at risk for developing trauma and anxiety from this pandemic. This sector of the population is one that we have been forced to expect considerable effort from and not consider the repercussions of these needs due to the severity of the situation. In large-scale catastrophes, such as the coronavirus outbreak, first responders, including nurses, ambulance and social workers, are at a higher risk of developing anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. First responders endure significantly increased assignments, wear protective gear for extended periods, while meticulously following contagion control procedures, which puts them at risk for stress, anxiety and PTSD.
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