Alone and Together- the ‘infectious rise’ of e-gatherings
Laila Danesh and Mehtaab Singh Johal, Medical Students, Kings College London,
and Dr Koravangattu Valsraj, Consultant Psychiatrist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
In 1973, the Stanford Psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper ‘On Being Sane in Insane places’, where he argued that a diagnosis of insanity, and by extension other mental health disorders, depends on culture and context. During the current Covid-19 pandemic, 19 million people1 in the UK had felt high levels of anxiety in one period; would you call this clinical anxiety or normalise this as ‘just what happens in a pandemic’?
Time will tell, but we have a feeling that the answer could be that both are true. SARS, MERS, Ebola, Swine flu and Zika gave us a new fright each time, but they all passed relatively quickly. Nothing, in recent memory, has ever brought the entire world to a standstill until now. As 2020 draws to a close we realise that it has been a year that the globalised world remained frozen, and we hope that things will start to thaw and warm up in 2021.
Every author of this brief newsletter article had a different experience of Covid-19. One of the author’s first experience with Covid-19 in February 2020 was at home when both parents were affected by the disease. The other author had the experience of being tested positive and having to quarantine during a medical school placement. The last author had witnessed Covid-19 positive passengers and contacts being offloaded from a flight and also experienced treating Covid-19 positive patients. The common emotions and experience for all three are the feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, sense of being made to feel alone(‘together but not together’), and a sense of helplessness.
The pandemic experience can be well encapsulated by the Robbie Burns poem ‘To a mouse’ written in 1785. With winter approaching, the mouse works hard to build a make-shift shelter, however, unbeknownst to the mouse, a plough comes along and destroys his home and thus his plans for winter. As this happens Burns says ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men, Go oft awry’ and Covid-19 is the plough that destroyed hopes, plans, dreams, and aspirations. The fear of the unknown and the heightened uncertainties made life a chaotic storm for us all and there was an understandable concern about the impact of the pandemic on emotional well-being, with an increase in levels of anxiety and of doom and gloom.
Dealing with uncertainty is anxiety provoking and that, combined with the varied negative feelings evoked by the pandemic, compounds the complexity. However, humans are always ever so resilient and creative.
Then almost immediately a range of apps (to name a few: Zoom, Houseparty, MS Teams, Skype, WhatsApp group video call) came to the rescue and helped us to reconnect. However, we were all together in being alone. There is something different about seeing the smiles of your loved ones in person that no text, letter or screen image can ever accomplish. However, technology helped facilitate the smile on screen, even with its limitations, and that is better than nothing.
We are now in a second lockdown and life still feels like an episode of Black Mirror, though this time we have all adjusted to the ‘new normal’.
Despite being the tool of choice for most ‘dystopian’ futures, technologies like these are incredible things that have made this pandemic easier to cope with in so many ways.
Let us hope that this does not remain forever as the ‘new normal’. E-gatherings are not what we would wish forever.
We look forward to the utopian future of being ‘together together’ in face to face gatherings and not being ‘together and alone’ in e-gatherings. We remain anxious about what ‘new normal’ means in the medium to longer term as we wish to reconnect in the ‘old normal’ way and have meaningful connections.
[1] www.ons.gov.uk. (n.d.). Coronavirus and anxiety, Great Britain - Office for National Statistics. [online] Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/coronavirusandanxietygreatbritain/3april2020to10may2020.