Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Apparently, it's a competition.

Apparently, people should feel stigma and suffer in silence? Nice.

Anonymous wrote:Apparently, it's a competition.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a lot of shades of gray between being nervous about giving a speech and crippling anxiety, btw.

Lots of people have interrupted sleep, interrupted work, interrupted relationships and various dosing of anxiety meds and none of these people have "crippling anxiety"

Right? I could barely sleep for several weeks, right before Thanksgiving until after the inauguration. If you COULD sleep well with literally a 9/11 death count happening in America every day from a pandemic, AND an attack on the Capitol, AND the final cruel shots from the last administration, I wonder at your sanity.

Anonymous wrote:We now have names for disorders and ailments, and we are progressing to a place where there’s not as much shame/stigma/hush-hush.

In other words, the days of locking Aunt Alice away for bipolar disorder are over. Aunt Alice has bipolar disorder, she can talk about it, she can manage it with meds and therapies, and there it is.

We can talk about anxiety now. And because we have social platforms, we can even talk to people outside of our social circle about it. A friend of mine from elementary through high school suffers from depression. I haven’t seen him in 20 years, but we connect online. So I can add him to my list of “someone I know is dealing with depression,” whereas before the dawn of social, we wouldn’t have kept in touch on that level.

I usually enjoy good mental health, but this pandemic did cause me to fall into a temporary state of depression and anxiety. I am just now starting to get out of it.

Is it imagination that you lack, OP, or critical thinking skills? Or empathy? Or all three?

Anonymous wrote:There's a lot of shades of gray between being nervous about giving a speech and crippling anxiety, btw.

Lots of people have interrupted sleep, interrupted work, interrupted relationships and various dosing of anxiety meds and none of these people have "crippling anxiety"

Since Sigmund Freud’s characterization of religion as a “mass-delusion” nearly 100 years ago, mental health professionals and scientists have eschewed the spiritual realm. Current efforts to flatten the COVID-19 mental health curve have been almost entirely secular. The American Psychological Association’s extensive set of consumer resources makes no mention of spirituality. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s only spiritual recommendation is to “connect with your community- or faith-based organizations.” Of more than 90,000 active projects presently funded by all 27 institutes and centers within the National Institutes of Health, fewer than 20 mention spirituality anywhere in the abstract, and only one project contains this term in its title. Needless to say, a lack of funding for research on spirituality hamstrings clinical innovation and dissemination.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think a lot of people have underlying anxiety that they've managed to repress by staying busy. The pandemic made it so they couldn't be busy. Add that with the constant media hype over the pandemic and it caused people to spin out of control. I have anxiety and have been a nurse working on a Covid ward since the beginning (though we haven't had any cases at my hospital in 3 weeks and have less than 15 hospitalized in my entire state!). Had I not used my coping techniques my anxiety would have spiraled and I would have been like those you describe.

The pandemic actually reset me and my boundaries. It gave me a year of freedom from judgement or expectations from friends, family, and work. I've since extended that year to January 2022.

I do what I want, when I want, blow off whatever I want and it feels so damned good.