Anxiety, depression, poor mental health – our brains broke during Covid-19, so how do we fix them once the coronavirus pandemic is over?
- Our body releases hormones to help us survive when we are stressed. If the stressor never goes away, our brain changes – here’s how the changes can be reversed
Orgies are back – or at least that’s what advertisers want you to believe.
One advertisement for chewing gum – whose sales plummeted during 2020, because who cares what your breath smells like when you are wearing a mask? – depicts the end of the pandemic as a raucous free-for-all, with people embracing in the streets and making out in parks.
The reality is a little different. People are slowly coming out of the pandemic, but as they re-emerge, there is still a lot of trauma to process. It is not just our families, our communities and our jobs that have changed; our brains have changed, too.
We are not the same people we were 18 months ago.
During the winter of 2020, more than 40 per cent of Americans reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, which is double the rate of the previous year. That number dropped to 30 per cent in June 2021 as vaccinations rose and Covid-19 cases fell, but this still leaves nearly one in three Americans struggling with their mental health.