This pandemic is very strange mental-wise, all my doctors note that. The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor, but in my country it's called "an advisory self-isolation" and everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageable").
I'm not a social person (age almost 40), and I ought not to feel any consequences of that, cause even a strict lockdown wouldn't change my life too much. And I have a friend who isn't particularly stress-prone (a former warzone guy, 4 kids, a strong mindset).
And guess what, we both experienced numerous acute panic attacks in 2020, without realizing what it was. We both have called an ambulance and thought this is the end of me, only to learn later what panic attack is. And we both never got covid. Doctors say that it is a very common phenomenon to observe. Idk about him, but my mental state I find pretty questionable now, because something induces anxiety in it non-stop from the spring 2020. I don't watch TV, neither read on pandemic situation consciously. Visited therapist for a whole last year.
I can imagine what all that does to regular people, and probably can't imagine what teens may feel about it.
Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?
You're not the only one and more level-headed psychologists have warned about this pretty early last year. People are bombarded with horror news about ever rising case numbers of this 'killer virus' on a daily basis. Read up on mass psychosis and mass psychology in general. There are many documented cases in the past, but this time with the internet and our ever more connected world we seem to have a case gone global. The media plays a major part, just look at how case numbers are reported without putting them in relation to the total number of tests done. It's reported when water is tested positive for sars-cov-2, but then negative aspects of the panic are downplayed by for example reporting the increase in suicide attempts as 22.3% + 39.1% in this article. As we know from surveys the average reader will not understand this adds up to around 70% more suicide attempts since the start of the pandemic, because most people aren't good at math.
I'm certain if people were bombarded with touching individual case reports of people, including children, suffering under the measures and not just under the effects of the virus, public opinion would be different. As it is the reporting is very one sided though with everyone focused on the virus to the point that nothing else matters anymore to many. It's not surprising that this can induce panic, I find it scary myself.
> Read up on mass psychosis and mass psychology in general.
The entire anti-vaxxer movement makes perfect sense if you look at it like a mass psychosis of denial and a trauma response.
Questioning the mainstream media is a bit of a meme these days and unfortunately most people that bring up this point have a bit of an agenda to say the least, but: One thing that’s bothered me about the MSM from the start of the pandemic is the market fueled necessity to keep pumping out “news” when nothing important has happened.
Our desire to keep ourselves more informed has perhaps created this MSM monster that now through overexposure of fear and all other negative emotions that “sell” themselves are responsible for the trauma response that is conspiracy theories, flat out denial and a lack of consideration of expertise, not only for the pandemic but for climate change and much more.
I’d argue that the mandatory vaccine crowd are exactly the same.
Edpecially when natural immunity is completely overlooked.
Also I beleive that everytime officcials and MSM and threads like these completely undermine and ignore the millions of people who are traumatized by the pretty rough vaccine side effects ( Moderna is no joke ). these people wonder what else os being hidden.
And the gap becomes wider and more fantatic.
There is no anti vaxx movement.
As so many people are being infected anyway, odd are they are not showing up for boosters once infected.
And sinve the vaccine cards expire in 9 months (EU), you are never getting the entire EU population to show up for yearly inoculation.
Especially those who got infected anyway and those who suffered pretty badly by the vaccines but are ruthelessly dismissed.
Anti vaxx movement is dead.
The vaccines are incredibly leaky, and cause pretty severe side effects especially in young men.
They do not allow society to resume normality even if 100% are vaccinated ( do the math, the effect wears off so fast that its impossible to keep 100% even if every single himan on the planet had access and diligently showed up ).
The anti vaxx sentiment is dead. It died with omicron.
In a year all but older people i the rich west and possibly health care workers will techincally be considered unvaccinated.
Also, masks still made no difference in the spread.
Not even a dent in Omicron.
Only countries with high natural immunity has had relatively lower omicron curves.
Try the antivaxxer/antimasker /smooth brain/trumpis propaganda all you want in the virtual world.
In the real one, parents want their children back to school.
Elderly want to enjoy the few uears they have left outside of covid prison.
Young people want to meet and fuck other young people.
And evrr single officcial MSM praised health expert has turned out to be not only wrong, but laid a platform for intruse sureveillance and degrading humans to nothing more than viral plague hosts that most be muffled, injected and locked up.
Tldr; antivaxxer as a basis for the hatred of common hunan desire to find someone to hate is dead. Vaccines and masks are nowhere near what was promised and omicron proved it
I find your conflation of support for vaccines with support for lockdowns rather odd, because vaccines are the main thing that lessens the need for social restrictions!
> Anti vaxx movement is dead. The vaccines are incredibly leaky, and cause pretty severe side effects especially in young men. They do not allow society to resume normality even if 100% are vaccinated ( do the math, the effect wears off so fast that its impossible to keep 100% even if every single himan on the planet had access and diligently showed up ).
They are leaky, but not incredibly so. They show around 70-80% protection (with 3 doses for Omicron, 2 for earlier variants). That's a massive difference, especially when you consider that for a second-order transmission that reduces the chance by 80% of the 20% remaining, making it 95% effective and so on.
As a young person who has had ongoing side effects from the vaccine, I have to say that I'm the only person I know who has had this problem. It's very rare. Similar side effects from covid itself are much more common in all demographic categories (except for moderna in young men - they should get a different vaccine).
80% isn't protection. 80% still gets you pregnant.
Honestly, it's probably healthier for everyone to turn off the news for a half year, and did not worry about it. If you get sick, take care of it. If you don't, take care of those who do.
Lose weight. Exercise. Eat healthy. Live your life. Build and nurture friendships. Find and improve hobbies. Grow your family. You'll be fine until you die. But you can die any and every day for any arbitrary reason, so forget COVID and start taking care of life.
> If you get sick, take care of it. If you don't, take care of those who do.
Hospitals were getting overwhelmed. So "taking care of it" for many was not as trivial as the usual flu. Consider that 40% of adults in the US are obese which is a complicating factor for unvaxed infection.
While I agree there is an element of personal responsibility to obesity, the industrialized food system is rigged to make everyone fat if they live long enough.
It requires winning the genetic lottery or having a significant amount of self control to maintain a healthy weight as one ages. In some places healthier food is also more expensive, such as in major cities and food deserts.
Until the food industries are regulated more responsibility it's unrealistic and cruel for those of us born to be thinner to demand people 'just' exercise more and eat less.
People with 2 dose vaccinations are well protected from serious disease, taking up small fraction of hospital capacity (less intensive, shorter stays). Boosted folks are taking up less than that. It probably doesn't matter a lot for healthy people under 30, but that leaves an awful lot of people over 30 or with health problems where the available vaccines are hugely protective.
The current vaccines are leaky enough that any reductions in social restrictions below strict lockdown mean pretty much everyone is going to get Covid, generally over a very short time period. There doesn't seem to be any way around this. Also, the feasibility of putting lesser restrictions in place to try and spread the hospital load out is damaged by the fact that protection from vaccination fades relatively quickly - and that doesn't just seem to affect protection against infection, but also hospitalization and death. They're effective at reducing the number of deaths but just aren't the way out people like to claim they are.
“Pretty much everyone is going to get COVID” is how I feel as well, just like pretty much everyone is going to get the flu across any given 50 year span. Some will die from it, most will not. (C19 is obviously worse than a typical flu, but by less than a decimal order of magnitude.)
Then the interesting question is what to do about it. You can give up a lot of life’s freedoms and enjoyment to maybe cut that 50-year risk in half. Is that worth it? To my reckoning: Not to me, not to my elderly parents, and not to my kids. I’m thankful that my kids are at least pre-teen and not (yet) teen or college age where our choices are hitting much harder.
I guess if people are making their decisions based on a belief that significant reductions in hospitalization aren't beneficial, that explains something.
That graph is from the UK, where most of the people spending time in hospital due to Covid are vaccinated. The thing is that as you can see from the graph, there's a huge difference in hospitalisation rates between age groups, and in the UK there's not that many unvaccinated people amongst the high-risk age groups. (Actually, I'd be interested what the error bars on that are because they're subtracting vaccinations from the population estimate to get the denominator of total unvaccinated people and it seems like that'd be very sensitive to errors in their population estimate.)
So there is a signficant reduction in the risk of hospitalisation from vaccination right now, but we're seeing close to all the benefit that we're likely to at least from a society-wide perspective. There's no way to stop the hospital system from collapsing just by rounding up the remaining unvaccinated and getting them vaccinated. (Individual unvaccinated people might of course get a lot of personal benefit from getting jabbed, depending on age and health.)
> They show around 70-80% protection (with 3 doses for Omicron, 2 for earlier variants)
That protection level lasts for about two months and then nosedives to uselessness[0].
If we keep pumping people with boosters, the manufacturers and the media aren't going to be able to keep suppressing reporting about the resulting heart issues the mRNA vaccines cause in many people[1].
Again, the vaccines are astoundingly leaky and were designed for a variant of the virus that hasn't existed in any meaningful way for a while.
People with only natural immunity from any variant are shown to have much better protection than mRNA vaccinated and boosted people[2].
> They show around 70-80% protection (with 3 doses for Omicron, 2 for earlier variants).
What is the absolute risk reduction you get from the shots? “95% effective” is a relative risk reduction and only refers to severe illness or death, not infection or transmission (neither of which were studied).
> E[s]pecially when natural immunity is completely overlooked.
The one thing about natural immunity is that it does not prevent the transmission or spread of the virus on a population level. For example, prior to the ’90s, there were yearly outbreaks of varicella among school aged children despite the fact that at least 99% of the adult population has natural immunity to the disease.
After widespread vaccination, outbreaks of that disease are practically unheard of.
For the same virus, the CDC recommends that healthy adults over 50 years of age who have prior immunity get 2 additional doses of another formulation of that vaccine to prevent a resurgence of the same disease in older adults.
On another note, if the percentage of the population immune to a certain viral illness drops below a certain threshold because a subset of the population is refusing vaccination, then outbreaks will occur. It happened a few years ago with measles.
> The vaccines are incredibly leaky, and cause pretty severe side effects especially in young men
Do you have sources backing up this statement?
As for the concept of "leaky" vaccines, you need to realize that vaccines have never had 100% effectiveness and that their effectiveness is through achieving the goal of getting a high percentage of the population immune to a particular disease, something that's never really achieved by relying on natural immunity on its own.
Unfortunately, the parts of your comment pertaining to spread, immunity, and vaccinations are not accurate and rely on assumptions that are known to be false. Many people keep trying to counter bad information, but it seems like a battle that's not winnable[1].
> case numbers are reported without putting them in relation to the total number of tests done.
One other quirk of our society that has become clear is that what you hear in the media is absolutely correlated to which media you consume. In my experience, which is 99% reading news sites online, the testing is absolutely reported. Even emphasized, and made clear that the positivity % is a more telling metric than the number of cases. And that hospital utilization is the true metric we're trying to keep down.
FWIW, 22.3% was the 2019 -> 2020 stat, and 39.1% was the 2020->2021 stat. I'm really not sure what you mean by saying that stats from two separate years add up to 70%. Especially when those number do not.
But the article wasn’t reporting successive increases. The 22.3% was summer 2020 over summer 2019, while the 39.1% was the winter over the previous winter.
There’s not enough information reported to conclude that those increases “stack”.
>In my experience, which is 99% reading news sites online, the testing is absolutely reported
I've never ONCE in years, seen cases reported along with tests given and I look at sites of all political ideologies. You can go look in the front page of the New York times right now and there's just case counts with no indication of how many tests have been given. Same with WaPo.
It kind of boggles my mind how you could even say that.
That's kind of evidence of mass formation psychosis?
> It's reported when water is tested positive for sars-cov-2, but then negative aspects of the panic are downplayed by for example reporting the increase in suicide attempts as 22.3% + 39.1% in this article. As we know from surveys the average reader will not understand this adds up to around 70% more suicide attempts since the start of the pandemic, because most people aren't good at math.
I think the article split those numbers out because one was in summer and the other year over year in winter: you can't just sum them because among other reasons there is a seasonality component to suicide I believe.
Strange is an understatement. I can very much relate.
But if I'm being honest, so much has improved for me during the pandemic that I don't know how to feel about it.
I feel very guilty for saying this because people are dying and I've got more privilege than I can handle, but consider the following:
I was already anxious and depressed and wanted to self-isolate. Now everyone is anxious and depressed and forced to self-isolate.
I used to hate interactions with random people, especially delivery drivers. Now nobody wants to interact with anybody.
Being a remote worker was sort of weird. Now I can be remote and competitive.
There's so much more good content because everyone is at home and online. Also bigger gaming playlists.
Being a science news junkie has unlocked some real world value about how to best stay safe.
I learned a lot about how the public gets information and got rid of some "vaccine hesitant" friends and family.
mRNA vaccines are going to treat so many diseases so much faster now. HIV vaccine soon!
It used to be strange to wear a mask anywhere, even though it will keep you from getting sick during flu season, but now it's become normalized.
I'm sure there's a bunch of other things that I've already gotten used to and forgotten about, but mostly it's made avoiding face-to-face contact possible in pretty much every situation, which is really working for me right now.
Sure, I'm dissociating as years drift by with absolutely no social contact or memories, but I was probably going to do that anyway.
For me, this used to be a "mental health issue". Now I'm just responsible!
Of course, I won't be shocked if the virus ends up mutating in a way that wipes out humanity... but so far, with a little bit of luck, it's been a pretty big improvement for me personally.
I hope we somehow bring this to a sane resolution the same as everyone else, but I'm going to capitalize on this guilt-free way to self-isolate for as long as I reasonably can.
Clearly this some sort of bad and unhealthy way to live, but it's kind of comfy. I think English may lack a term for how this feels.
>I think English may lack a term for how this feels [comfy + unhealthy].
Perhaps we need a word. It would be a good one, since the best words combine complex, even opposite concepts. My first thought was "sickly-sweet". I also like the new phrase "doom scrolling", combining the dramatic and the banal, which also kind of applies. Somehow the phrase "doom snuggle" comes to mind (although this sounds more like a situation resulting in an unusable arm). Maybe better is "isolace", a portmanteau describing the solace of isolation.
Agoraphobia describes the anxiety that drives the behavior. English also has the phrase "shut-in" as well as the Japanese loan-word hikikomori, though that describes a person's behavior rather than the feeling behind the behavior.
> Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?
it has been excruciating for me living alone during 2020. Getting out of bed was a battle nearly every day. The pandemic came just in time when I thought I finally learned how to manage a severe depression that got triggered by a burnout, which was lasting over a decade, and included 2 suicide attempts, drug abuse, and losing most people in my life at that time due to my own behavior.
When the pandemic hit I realized that how I felt all these years has become suddenly a very common way people feel all over the world. Depressed, isolated and on the verge of succumbing to darkness.
What I learned for myself (long before the pandemic) is that I need: a strong routine which includes time-boxing not just work but also play. avoid any chemistry that changes the way I feel naturally (sugar, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and especially the self-prescribed weed). after reducing anything artificial mentioned, I started facing my emotions. that means stopping everything when a certain feeling hits me, and analyse that feeling telling myself it will eventually pass, but not taking any other action. e.g. I would not continue anything (including eating or drinking) and remain in my chair until I learned that this feeling has no power over me and that just because I feel it, isn't going to change my routine or send me back into my old rut. treating such dark emotions like a "monster" that can only be killed by staring at it until it leaves me alone, prevented sending me back to the dark place.
Another thing that has hugely contributed to recovery was changing the country. I moved to a new place 3x since 2020 and that has me thinking on my feet (new language, new things to discover, different culture, warm people). I have no time to wallow because I'm flooded with new experiences, and am making new memories every day. Even allowed myself to fall in love twice since the pandemic hit. But I'm not ready to bring in other people into "my new world".
The pandemic shook me awake. I realized there is a danger out there that is at least as scary as the darkness that lives in myself or anything I could do to myself. It made me realize that I need to screw my 5 or 10 year plans and do whatever I want right now or perhaps never will get a chance. It's not that I am in an easier situation than a family with toddlers, because my kids are grown up, my ex wife is god knows where, and so I can just go and do as I please. But the story I tell myself today is very different than 5 or 10 years ago. To paraphrase Don Draper in Mad Men: "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." (and this especially applies to the dialogue in my head)
Can you share which country you liked the best? I'm an expat living in Germany and I would characterize the people and culture here as the opposite of 'warm'. It's really taken its toll on my psyche in the last years...
hard to say. a lot of it is hindsight and doesn't reflect how I felt when I was there. it can be excruciating until you go from surviving to thriving. or it can be damaging staying in a toxic place too long.
every country I go to has a "honey moon" phase that lasts until reality hits when I'm forced to integrate (learn the language, start working, etc ...). Some countries are harder than others. On one hand I'm tempted to live an expat live (surround myself with foreigners and other people who are outward looking and who have a similar view on life), on the other hand, faster integration happens when facing the reality (and the struggle).
Less money upon arrival limits the honey-moon phase. Too much money could mean prolonging inertia.
These days I prefer Mediterranean countries where things are less "efficient", and I'm forced to adapt to a slower and more chaotic pace. I'm in love (put up) with the "chaos" of Latin countries. But finding work is also harder and requires sacrifices to what projects I accept and salary. Finding a local job with a terrible salary however can be better for the language skills.
It's hard to make an argument for Mediterranean places when most projects that pay well are abroad, so if salary is crucial for you maybe remote work can help.
After my honey-moon phase is over it gets really tough and staying put can be a horror. Having interests outside of work (e.g. history and culture of the place) usually gets me through. And I tend to stay longer if I learned the language and understood how locals live (which for me is the whole point of doing it).
If you build a client base as a freelancer all across Europe (or whatever continent) then the country itself doesn't matter so much. But you may end up without a real "home". I know that no matter how cool I think it is in the first 2 years, ultimately I will want to get out. Knowing my time is limited (e.g. 2-3 years max) allows me to stay positive and appreciate every day at the place I'm at. Usually I have milestones of what I want to achieve before I go there (that are always personal goals and have nothing to do with work. e.g. work is a means to an end and to achieve that private goal)
But to answer your question I'd say I like it anywhere with an ocean, and great food. If the food is bland usually the rest is less appealing. German food is not my thing but history and culture can make up for it. And there are plenty of international restaurants. So to live in Germany happily salary has to support eating out 3-4 times per week. Some places I liked would be Ireland (I dislike Dublin). Cork and Limerick are awesome, Palermo (or Rome), Madrid, Bilbao (I dislike Barcelona), Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence, Lisbon, Porto, Malta, Lausanne/Geneve, Copenhagem, Malmö ... even Eastern Europe (Belgrad, Zagreb) but only with remote jobs and with strictly time-boxed stay.
Some places in Germany are (IMHO) easier than others. Frankfurt is a sh!thole, the best thing about Munich is the highway to Austria (that will lead ultimately to Italy), Berlin is OK depending if you still want to party every night. Aachen & Cologne or Duesseldorf are more relaxed than Bavaria and I find people there really friendly and open. Again Bavaria is a nightmare IMHO. Although Duesseldorf or Cologne can get boring if you are with a partner or (gulp) kids, ... at least for my taste.
Luxembourg can be great but it's built on holding companies and off-shore money, so the scene can get a bit seedy and very banking/insurance oriented. I love Paris (single), but with kids it's a nightmare.
If you don't like Germany try Vienna. It's a bit more laid back than Berlin/Munich, and has culturally a lot to offer. Switzerland is equally cool due to the many meet-ups, winter-sports, mountaineering, great salary ... but can be equally tough as Germany especially if you're not planning on learning German. I think language is key. If I can't motivate myself to learn the language it means I must move on or end up getting depressed very quickly.
Most important for me was learning when it is time to look for a new adventure and when I should linger. There is a reward in sticking to a place (Singapore took me 2 years to fully appreciate and learn to love and I whined for 10 years after we left). Australia was great when I was there. Not sure how it is today, ... it seems they have thrown the tech community under the bus
Wherever you are, not getting out in time can also be very negative for yourself because we get back the vibes that we send out. Or if you're a very stubborn or tenacious person not getting out can also be incredibly rewarding provided you put in the work. Hard to say :)
I went to the emergency room after working from home for ~6 months when the pandemic hit. I was having severe chest pain, shaking uncontrollably, and feeling very uneasy. I thought something was really wrong, and ended up going to the emergency room, where they told me it was a panic attack, and everything was okay physically.
Like you, it was also the first time I had experienced a panic attack and learned what it felt like.
Yeah, the fear of death as they call it. I really didn't understand this phrase before, thinking it was something abstract. It's unlike any other feeling I've had, just off the charts. And I'm (was) not particularly the guy who is scared to watch a horror movie alone in the night.
I've experienced exactly the same as you both except all the way back in 2015 and so I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice in case it's helpful. I had never heard of panic attacks before I got one, had never worried once about my mental health etc. and so I also ended up at the emergency room convinced my death was imminent.
Considering my healthy history my doctor and I agreed to try deal with it on a lifestyle level. I did meditation, yoga and revised my diet. I became more healthy but still had the panic attacks. We then stepped this up to therapy which I did for a year but still had the panic attacks. They were totally random and incredibly draining. My life & work were seriously affected and so I eventually followed the doctors advice to consider medication. Saw a psychiatrist and started the most basic SSRI at the minimum dose for panic disorder. I had a few attacks during the first two weeks and then they just stopped entirely. 100% completely. Haven't had one since.
So - my advice. If you are seriously struggling with panic attacks on a continuing basis despite a reasonable level of lifestyle interventions please don't do what I did and basically resist trying psychiatric medicine because you're healthy, successful and happy in your life and can't see a "legit" reason to be on meds. It felt like a much bigger intervention to me than it really is. I know for some people dealing with this sort of thing isn't this easy but for a lot it seems it can be.
(Also I don't blame my doctors at all, I always felt well informed about the options available to me. Obviously in retrospect with the way my life was affected meant I should have seen a reason to try meds sooner. At least the year of therapy was good for me even though it didn't stop the panic disorder!)
In my case I tried to convince my therapist to prescribe medications, but he resisted. I mean he more like advised me to try CBT way and only fallback to pills in case of failure, because they only serve as a crutch if your thinking process went wrong. It just happens that some people need this crutch temporarily and will be fine later by themselves. After 4-6 sessions I picked my PAs apart without any medications, but stayed to fix my other issues for a year. So ymmv, I guess.
I wonder if something like St Johns wort would be enough to keep the panic attacks at bay if the SSRI is so light. Not that in your shoes I’d want to risk a switch after years of success. But it might be a good thing to try for someone who is hesitant to be prescribed.
Just wanted to add here for anyone considering St. John’s wort - it has a ton of negative interactions with lots of very common drugs, so check to make sure you aren’t already taking something that will interact with St. John’s wort. Ask your doctor.
For example, it can make birth control pills fail, allergy meds build up in your system, and serotonin build up if combined with another anti-depressant.
Yep. The fear is real. I used to be close to someone who had regular panic attacks, and now after my own experience I feel awful about not taking them more seriously.
>> The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor
The US never really locked down after maybe the first two or three week period. The “lockdowns” we had were mostly performative and not really enforced. This is in huge contrast to some cities in Australia for example, where lockdowns were both prolonged (lasting months) and those violating them were smacked down consistently.
And every Australian I know was happy about it too. Australia is very similar to the US, but one difference is that they're less oppositional. Helps that it actually seemed to work though I'm surprised there hasn't been more objection to the lack of tourism.
Of course, it's ineffective against omicron which is just too infectious to be stopped, and they aren't doing it now.
> And every Australian I know was happy about it too
Hmm... that's certainly not universal. I have a couple of Australian's I met travelling on instagram, and they are posting the most extreme anti-lockdown media I've seen (comparing it to nazi germany, etc). Not sure how common that sentiment is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's quite widespread. 18 months is a long time to be locked down for.
Australia has successfully navigated to my no-go list by their insanity. The lack of habeous corpus is very alarming as a tourist. The lack of rule of law it terribly frightening when that is all you can rely on if shit goes sideways on a trip.
Australia has shown they are the same level as the Middle East, e.g. Iran and Afghanistan.
Considering you need permission to walk outside without being locked up, and on top of that, they took away any means of self defense a decade or two ago, it's not much better than Afghanistan's warlord system.
I was in Melbourne for all but the first lockdown, and we were about as "happy" as a patient going in for knee reconstruction. I know that's not what you meant, but the lockdowns really sucked, even if they were the least bad choice and even if most of us agreed with them.
That's not really a lockdown though. You could, for example, still go outside your house whenever you wanted. In many parts of Australia though, you couldn't even go to the park to meet someone.
I had a series of severe panic attacks in beginning of December 2021. Ended up in emergency.
To be clear, i have chronic anxiety which got worse due to me moving to another country where i don't have any relatives. On top of that i was very overworked.
It's been a month since then and i still can't recover. It's very hard for me to go outside. If i go to unfamiliar places or there's too much people i start feeling like panic attack is building up. And on work, i can't concentrate, and have mild panic attacks during meetings(if i have to speak). Took a few weeks vacation which is ending in few days. And i feel like i'm still not ready to start working...
Mentally, VR has helped us a lot during the pandemic. Yes, it’s far from perfect and it’s not entirely the same as being physically there; but it is just awesome being able to hang out with family and friends in VR and have a sense of space. We workout together; or play racquetball, bowling, darts, ping pong, board games, or fish to name a few activities. These are people who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Some aren’t even in the same continent. Way better than a phone call or FaceTime / Zoom. Without it, my anxiety would seemingly get out of hand at times. I don’t live alone, but I also get somewhat isolated without it.
Outside of the pandemic, I can see parents using this as a convenient way to “hangout” and catch up with friends.
It’s too bad Facebook destroyed their reputation, or a lot more people would be trying it out and enjoying it at their $299 price point, especially the past two years. While PCVR is an option, it’s too expensive for normal people (starting around $2400 for everything) and setup is not easy for the non-technical.
It might just be different for different people. Like, my lifestyle and mental health got better and people like me can offset people like you (and I do have relative that had issues too).
I'm also curious about non-pandemic factors, such as social media.
Instagram grows in usage during the pandemic. And there's also TikTok. Both of these can highlight how much fun others are having while you're "stuck".
> .../ everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageble").
Most places I go in public (mainly grocery/retail stores) it's around 40% of the people I see do not wear masks, even when signs are clearly posted. I'm out in public far less than I was 2 years ago, so perhaps I'm statistically unlucky in seeing particularly 'bad' times, but probably not.
Interestingly, the Apple store in town was the only place I've ever seen where it was 100% mask usage, and they had some folks at the front that calmly but firmly prevented entrance without a mask. I saw that twice over a 3 month period, but... perhaps they've reverted now?
"Has" is the present tense. Nowhere in the US currently has "huge lockdowns". Also I wouldn't describe the New York full lockdown as lasting a very long time. The most severe lockdown in New York lasted just a few months and was much shorter than lockdowns in many regions of the world.
Kinda surprised I didn't have a worse reaction. I lived alone in a very small <350sf apartment.
One thing I did fairly early on was to get a therapist though. My reasoning was that they could basically help monitor my situation. Not that I don't have things to discuss with a therapist anyways. It helped I guess. No panic attacks, just some sleep issues and minor hallucinations.
It's your body getting a signal through, having to break through only with a panic level cascade, to get an unconscious understanding that the situation unfolding globally is potentially life threatening in an relatively uncontrollable way - and also perhaps observing the authoritarian control mechanisms being implemented around the world may have also lead to your mind extrapolating to that could become someone else wanting to "cage" you - whether you want to or not, taking away your free will; worth panicking for if you're not yet conscious of that possibility.
I've already found the source (or more correctly the trigger) of my panic attacks and while it was in the same plane you're assuming, the rest of it doesn't really match. I'm a very "free" guy who hates dumb restrictions. These restrictions could be potentially imposed in my neighborhood, unrelated to covid situation. Once I realized that with the help of my therapist, PAs reduced substantially and later went away. I would even agree with the idea of "caging", but I usually cage myself much more successfully than any pandemic measures do. I just thought about my feelings for the last hour and my anxiety is probably/in part about the mass media hysteria rather than restrictions. Compared to e.g. 2018 the entire existence background is filled with that constant creepy infonoise.
Anyway, it was a trigger and not the reason, you may turn out to be pretty close on that.
I think we're probably talking about the same thing, I could've been more careful with my language though. I don't think there's use in my working through to figure out better nuanced language to use, otherwise I'm glad you found resolution to the anxiety triggered.
I'm not a social person (age almost 40), and I ought not to feel any consequences of that, cause even a strict lockdown wouldn't change my life too much. And I have a friend who isn't particularly stress-prone (a former warzone guy, 4 kids, a strong mindset).
And guess what, we both experienced numerous acute panic attacks in 2020, without realizing what it was. We both have called an ambulance and thought this is the end of me, only to learn later what panic attack is. And we both never got covid. Doctors say that it is a very common phenomenon to observe. Idk about him, but my mental state I find pretty questionable now, because something induces anxiety in it non-stop from the spring 2020. I don't watch TV, neither read on pandemic situation consciously. Visited therapist for a whole last year.
I can imagine what all that does to regular people, and probably can't imagine what teens may feel about it.
Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?