SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the would-you-like-to-talk-about-it? dept.
How to keep your sanity when you feel like the world is going crazy:
Hi there. How are you feeling today?
It's a loaded question right now. Many of us are having extraordinary feelings in response to extraordinary times. Hundreds of millions of people here in the United States and around the world are doing their best to help contain the spread of novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 by following World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control guidelines and, bluntly, staying the heck away from other people.
Even for a born introvert like yours truly, the era of prolonged, enforced social distancing is hard. Folks are either stuck at home alone, stuck at home with their families, or still having to go out into the world every day to work—either because their work is vital or their employers are being stubborn—and all the while, we're being buffeted by government warnings and endless waves of frightening news.
In short: right now, we're all exchanging some measure of our mental health in order to preserve our own and others' physical health, and that has limits. We're all in this together, for several weeks and months, if not longer, and basically, we need to avoid driving ourselves and each other crazy if we're going to get through it.
That, of course, is easier said than done. To that end, we called up mental health experts to ask what, realistically, we should all be doing to help ourselves and others.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @06:23AM (6 children)
Strong action needs to be taken, and some states are doing just that, by requiring paid sick leave, expanding unemployment benefits, restricting banks and landlords from foreclosing/evicting people who can't pay and restricting utilities from cutting off electricity/gas/water/Internet during this crisis.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday March 23 2020, @07:38AM (5 children)
That comment is both reassuring and depressing. Outside the US, national governments are directing virus response policy in a coordinated manner. In the US it's the luck of the draw about how your state governor is going to handle things, some are handling it well, others badly. Real leadership from the top, rather than random press statements often contradicted minutes or hours later, is almost entirely absent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @09:20AM
> Outside the US, national governments are directing virus response policy in a coordinated manner.
hmmmm, get informed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by SpockLogic on Monday March 23 2020, @12:54PM (3 children)
I don't F'n think so. My daughter is an RN at a leading teaching hospital in London. Her surgical ward has been turned over to treating coronavirus patients and they are very sick. The staff are running out of PPE and the morgue is nearly full. She said that British PM Bojo is living in an alternate reality just like our orange shit gibbon. Here in the US we are about two or three weeks behind the UK. It's going to get a lot worse, an F'n lot worse before it gets better.
I find gallows humor is the best medicine so I made myself a new ringtone from REM's "It's The End Of The World".
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @09:19PM
No one outside UK thinks that they have real government right now (not even half of the people in UK) with that buffoon on the top.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:58AM (1 child)
After the US, the UK has probably the second-worst "leadership" in a crisis situation. I was talking about countries with actual leadership. Take for example Bulgaria, a... not very functional country where things sort of work some of the time. They activated 40-year-old Warsaw Pact bioweapons attack protocols and put some Major-General with an unpronouncable name in charge of running things, with the PM stepping back and letting those trained for it run the show. Given the limited resources and other limitations due to the fact that it's, well Bulgaria, they're actively responding and getting shit sorted as best they can. Fricken' *Bulgaria* has better leadership in this crisis than the most powerful country on earth, whose Covid19 czar wants to let Covid19 carriers back out in public ("Vice President Mike Pence indicated on Sunday at a White House briefing about the virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue new guidelines on Monday, allowing some people who have been exposed to the coronavirus to resume working outside their homes if they wear masks"), and whose leader is twittering about unproven drugs that he reckons are miracle cures.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:45AM
Here in Canada, it is the various "Chief Medical Officers", regional, Provincial and Federal that are doing a lot of the leading and getting as much public facing time as the politicians, who are mostly involved with the economic part.