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“The next wave of coronavirus infections will be primarily psychological,” psychiatrist Mustafa Hussein said in a brief interview during the preparation of this report. The pandemic has imposed measures of physical distance, different feelings ranging from fear of illness to lack of human communication, and a feeling of exhaustion from the endless and terrifying news.
For most of us, the world has shrunk to become the same size as home. The sudden disconnection from life, as we know it, created a tremendous feeling of anxiety. The routine encourages tranquility, and losing it facilitates depression. The turmoil in the world is offset by the turmoil in our minds, and between the two disturbances we try to maneuver isolation, fear, and a sense of idleness, and discover how to live with turmoil.
However, the new temporary feelings for most of those living now are a reality that has been tested by all those who are placed under the umbrella of “psychopaths” and “people with personality disorders” by medical classifications. While the disruption in the world caused by the pandemic provided an opportunity to recognize the need to slow down life and accept feelings of fear and idleness, this was not the case in the past that we discussed in this report.
Here, three people share aspects of their daily lives under Corona: they talk about their personal upheavals and their interaction with the turmoil of the world around them, and about the daily maneuvers to continue.
Ali *, 33, starts her day normally. Have breakfast, coffee and smoke one or more cigarettes on the balcony, before going down to the street sun. He just stands there enjoying the sun and staying in one room, before returning to his room again. You could spend time in a mobile game before doing some homework. He has lunch and leaves his room at the end of the day to run on the adjacent streets. Go back again before the curfew begins, to make a long call to your colleague residing in another country. Work a little before bed.
This is the best version of Ali’s days, but another version is much worse, when his space between the bed and the balcony is reduced, and his activities are limited to smoking, drinking coffee and sleeping, without the ability or desire to communicate with anyone, or the movement. Beyond those few meters.
During the time of the pandemic, Ali had a lot of effort, and lots of distracting exercises too, just to achieve that formula: waves of anxiety produced by the “bad days”, before they backtracked a bit to allow for good / normal days, and then the cycle was repeated again.
“In the course of my history of illness, this is the worst time,” Ali describes “Mada Masr” in recent weeks. Her medical history is a period of more than 10 years since she was diagnosed with a “delusional illness” accompanied by depression and anxiety disorder. The illusion of the disease makes the owner visualize the symptoms of the disease and sometimes feel that they are real, to create all this fear of permanent loss of life.
Initially, with the first few weeks of the Coruña virus spreading, there was a state of fear and anxiety that swallowed up any other Ali concerns. Later, “realizing that the entire world is experiencing the same crisis and that there is no way out, the fear associated with Corona begins to interact with all other fears,” thus describing the development of the feeling of fear.
The reaction between Corona’s fear and the “illusion of illness” takes such forms as thinking of a heart attack scenario, a long-standing obsession with Ali, who is driven by another step who thinks of not being able to go to the hospital for fear of infection with the Coronavirus, which will lead to death alone. at home.
Another scenario is that depression and permanent anxiety affect your immunity, making you more vulnerable to infection with the coronavirus. This scenario increases feelings of anxiety, which increases the weakening of immunity, which increases the chances of contracting the virus, and so on.
Ali is a journalist. Here he explains how this affects his ability to deal with the pandemic, saying: “I am busy forcing myself to follow social media all the time, at a time when everyone treats themselves as WHO representatives, and everyone they publish news about high infection rates everywhere in the world, new virus symptoms and the interaction of the disease with smokers, and as a result of this I start to feel symptoms, whether it is cough or shortness of breath. ”
Without access to any of the various forms of psychological support, the task of dealing with all of these feelings becomes more difficult. Ali says she is no longer able to meet friends due to physical separation procedures, and psychotherapy sessions have been stopped because most psychiatric clinics have closed because the virus has spread, and Ali is not comfortable. in all online treatment sessions. This is explained by the fact that he does not achieve the same degree of communication with the processor, nor does it feel safe to use applications such as “Zoom”, for example, to talk about him in the smallest details of his personal life.
Ali’s life may not be much different now than the last two years in his isolation, he says, but the difference here is in the choice or his absence, “When this is imposed on you by the logic of fear, there is something different. I am not afraid that anyone will stop you and punish you when you leave home. No, it is a fear that you will get sick and die.
Ali describes how the Corona virus makes us live a realistic condition under totalitarian regimes: “You will not know your companions or your family, and if you know them you will not greet or hug them. When you wear a muzzle and try not to touch any need and think permanently about the distance between you and the rest of the passers-by, and you will return to the house before 8 o’clock at night to avoidTo wander.
The life reproduced by the virus is «free from any entertainment or social life. In short, the virus turns us into machines in the form of the youth of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong. This doesn’t happen because someone has imposed your life on you, but the result of self-censorship is more difficult. “
“Expecting a calamity is the hardest thing for a person with borderline personality disorder. And I felt all the time waiting for death. “I had a feeling that we are at the end of the world and we will see tragic events.” The feeling of the end of the world began with Shaima *, 30, and the Egyptian government announced, in mid-March, that the study would be suspended, then the movement of airports and the number of workers in the country would be reduced.
Shaimaa had already made several decisions, before the state’s actions, to protect her three daughters. He decided to keep them at home, and the nanny received permission for the duration of the crisis, and stayed at home to look after the children.
“Normally, I can’t live without a babysitter,” she says, “because it’s very possible during a 10-day period that I couldn’t do anything because of a sharp wave of mood swings.” At that time, the governess was essential to her care. But in the end, I was forced to do without his services right now, because I don’t want him to stay home every day, install transportation, and retire with the girls. ”
Although previous government decisions reassured her at first, because she felt her fear during the weeks leading up to those decisions was warranted, the scenes of pharmacies without personal protection tools and scrolling in supermarkets to buy different household items once again terrified.
Shaima has been turning to pharmacies in an attempt to buy alcohol for sterilization, and in her imagination, the fear that food will disappear from stores, adding to previous fears of a family member becoming infected. with the virus, or a lack of enough money to cope with a long period of inactivity or worsen the situation. Year due to the pandemic and the stage of economic collapse.
“It was the monster that created excessive thinking,” she says. At the time, Bigelie had many suicidal thoughts. Shaima explains that the thoughts that motivate the end of life in such circumstances become more frequent while waiting for a misfortune not to occur, but the continuous and long rounds of treatment that she went through helped her overcome this stage and control her thoughts. Furthermore, it causes Borderline personality disorder Its owner has violent and rapid mood swings from top to bottom. In a panicking general climate, a double effort is required to control mood swings.
For the past few weeks, Shaima has tried to keep herself and her daughters busy all the time, to avoid giving way to anxiety, thinking about the future, or feeling bored. In addition to the housework that she usually asks her daughters to help her with her performance, she tries to discover new ways to entertain at night, such as throwing empty bottles or trying to make an Araujos theater with cardboard boxes or other crafts.
Shaima’s continued attempts to create a daily routine for girls and keep them away from boredom reduce the time available to spend with themselves., Especially with insufficient help from other family members. She explains: “In the first one, the girls slept at 8 at night and woke up at 6 in the morning, so I had a day from 8 to 12 at night for myself. Now, that time has completely disappeared. because the girls’ daily routine is completely over with their satisfaction. ” Shaimaa tries again to restore the routine of her life and that of her family, but she faces resistance from the children, which increases the disorder of the day and the feeling of exhaustion and tension.
To compound Shaima’s sense of stress is the difficulty of reaching psychological support during these times. With the closure of psychiatric clinics, only online psychotherapy sessions are available, operating at a slower Internet speed, under pressure from isolated home users. In the end, you may need to complete the session over the phone, without being able to see your doctor, which reduces the feeling of communication.
In addition to individual therapy sessions, Shaima participates in regular meetings of one of the treatment groups. Before the pandemic, attending group meetings was fun for her. Where he spends about two and a half hours among a group of colleagues who have become friends over time. With the switch to remote meetings, new problems have arisen: some participants do not have the luxury of privacy in their homes, in addition to the increased tension and anxiety of most group members, which makes controlling the meeting is very difficult and exhausting.
In the midst of all this hustle and bustle, despite Shaima’s difficulties, Shaima tries to draw inspiration from attempts to care for herself with a sense of worth and self-esteem, which does not necessarily depend on what she produces. She decided to temporarily postpone any work-related project, after feeling angry at all the calls on social media to take advantage of the isolation time at home in a “productive” way. It says “this is the time to survive” and nothing else.
She compared this to her sentiment towards the times before the pandemic: “All the time, the world felt that I needed to work harder to demonstrate that I was sharing, the time necessary to run, because the world itself is full of mistakes and I am not standing. If at some point I was tired, my individual problem would remain, not another, “she said, adding:” But everyone is sitting now … and it turns out that it helps in normal sleep. ”
Isolation, loneliness, agitation and lack of human contact with others are the characteristics of life that the Corona pandemic has imposed on many people. The situation may seem exceptional to many, but for Elaine * it is different.
Eileen wrote the following lines a few days before speaking to Mada Masr:Our tastes of people with mental illness don’t need the end-of-the-world nightmare to feel like their lives are cut short over and over again, especially in a world that only recognizes one type of nervous system job, a world that imposes meaning of shame and marginalization always because we do not produce the required form of ourselves. Our non-heterosexual proverbs suffer daily to communicate with each other, because we live in a world and among people who always try to keep us away, with the same hostility and insistence of a pandemic.».
This does not mean that living in a time of pandemic makes Eileen’s daily experience similar to that of previous years. On the contrary, the experience becomes more difficult for two reasons, according to what she explains: the first is that she is ill with bipolar disorder, and the second is that she Coconut fiber [ذوو الهويات الجندرية غير النمطية].
“Naturally, I’m making an effort to be accepted into the world,” says Eileen. I have to control my mood changes every day, my hours of sleep, the rate of acceleration of my thoughts, I must make sure to do my exercise exercises, that regularly in doses of the drug, I do not have psychotic symptoms. I feel like living in a military camp. This is my normal life. “
What Eileen describes, 40 years working in the field of educationIn the paragraph above, they are the procedures you impose on yourself in normal times, just to meet the world’s requirements, including: staying productive, consistent, and stable, with as little turbulence as possible. The pandemic adds another layer of “collective anxiety and panic,” says Eileen. However, he is already exhausting from everything he does on normal days, and by no means is it worth adding this layer of panic or imposing more control on himself.
“I am not dealing with this situation alone. I am also dealing with the human geography of human circles suffering in one way or another.” Imagine how much effort I or others have made to make sure that people close to me are in circles. Al-Quiriyyah [ذوي الهويات الجندرية غير النمطية] Or in psychiatric circles there are two good things, not to collapse, and Bilaqu has enough support. Eileen describes Corona’s additional burden.
But the annoying thing about Eileen is that the world only now realizes that “it is acceptable for them to fear isolation, it is acceptable for them to remain frustrated or depressed, acceptable that they cannot produce it.” Eileen does not believe it is fair for the world to celebrate the wisdom she only learned during the time of the pandemic, without paying attention to the fact that the feelings of fear that are no longer occurring, isolating or losing contact are the daily feelings of those who suffer. mental illness while facing the requirements of the world. Who does not necessarily see their needs.
She explains this by saying: “I am my life, no one said that normal, I am not productive, no one said that it is acceptable for me to remain depressed and tired of isolation.” […] As if the problem was the need for a pandemic in the world, people understood this after two months, but from isolation, while living my whole life trying to save this for myself.
And you will see that the “world” will not learn from that experience how to change its laws and frameworks to be more inclusive for different people, nor will it change to be more open to people in all their diversity, it will be closer to a time period and soon the world will return to the former. In the end, Eileen sees that “Mahdesh says that I have experienced the feeling of isolation now, because I either sympathize with people who were isolated before that, or experienced the feeling of fear of being excluded. I sympathize with people who felt ostracized. ” The speech still focuses on the experiences of heterosexuals and is convinced of the existence of a single nervous pattern. As if we did not have a place in the world, and we would prefer a place in the world.
Eileen concludes by saying, “Part of me doesn’t want the pandemic to end and life to return to normal. Now I have the opportunity to say that I am not just the rhythm because I do not walk with the world, you too. Therefore, I will seize the opportunity and take my full right from before the pandemic. Leave my mind to myself, put less pressure on my soul and allow me to remain less productive …
* The names mentioned in the report and some personal details are not true to keep the sources private.
