Pandemic Psychosis and mental illness
A significant mental health burden has been imposed on communities around the world as a result of the emergence and global spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that emerged in 2019. In many cases, psychological stressors such as fear of illness and death, prolonged social isolation, uncertainty, and fear about the future, as well as distrust of the government and others, are to blame for the development of pandemic psychosis.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a watershed moment in global history, illuminating above all the limitations of the social forces that shape our health. Many more people died than were necessary as a result of our weakened social and economic systems, which had predisposed us to poor health in the first place.
The pandemic of fear
“We are living in the most fearmongering era in the history of the human race. Individuals and organizations who are able to perpetuate these fears have a great deal of power and money at their disposal, which is the primary reason for creating pandemic psychosis.”
Your fear is worth billions of dollars to the news media, insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians, and a slew of other organizations. It also helps that your fear is very easy to manipulate, which is fortunate for them. We’re hardwired to respond to it first and foremost above all else. In the event that we miss an opportunity for abundance, life continues; however, if we miss an important fear cue, life does not continue.
According to Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neurobiology professor who directs a fear-research lab, the more we learn about the brain, the more we realize it isn’t supposed to make you happy all of the time. The majority of the time, it acts as a stress-reactive machine. This is because its primary function is to keep us alive, which is why it is so easy to manipulate people into feeling fear all of the time.”
Where are we headed?
And so our biology and psychology are just as flawed and prone to corruption as the systems and politicians that we are so afraid of, if not more so. We fall prey to a variety of cognitive distortions and emotional overreactions when assessing future risks, and this is especially true when assessing the likelihood of future events.
Many believe that the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure located deep within each hemisphere of the brain, is the source of our emotional responses, particularly fear, and that it is responsible for these responses. The term “amygdala hijacking” was coined by author Daniel Goleman to describe what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are intended to do: trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to intervene. As a result, both the right and the left believe their opponents’ media is causing people to behave in this way.
Reason vs Chaos
Clearly, these and other fear illusions influence our behavior, influencing everything from voting decisions to supporting policies that are contrary to our own interests, to prejudice, divisive rhetoric, murder, and crimes against entire groups of individuals. This is a playbook that, in the wrong hands, has the potential to be used for mass manipulation as well as personal power. But if certain techniques can stoke our anxieties and fears generating pandemic psychosis, why can’t they also be used to alleviate them in the same way?
Individuals who believe they have little or no control over their own lives are at risk of becoming depressed, whereas those who believe they have a voice and can influence the situation have an optimistic outlook.
When it comes to feeling comfortable with change, you can either attempt to gain control and certainty, or simply learn to accept uncertainty and ambiguity while seeking to understand things that you are afraid of.
