Hi,

Last Thursday, I got a private message on Twitter from someone who’d just started following me. They said they’d seen on a television channel and wanted to ask me an urgent mental health-related question.

It was this: how do we survive weeks in a lockdown in the same house as our parents?

India has been in complete lockdown since 25 March as it ramps up its efforts to tackle the coronavirus. The prime minister addressed the nation at 8pm on 24 March and said, "For the sake of your family, forget what going out feels like for the next 21 days." Many people believe this is just the trailer. We are in for one loooong dystopian movie.

Personally, I have a great job that requires me to work from home anyway, and – don’t judge me for saying this – I am not a lover of the outdoors either. I have a full refrigerator and healthy family members. But for millions of poor people in India, For instance, stranded without work, money, food or shelter in the big cities, thousands of migrant workers who run India’s economic engine have suddenly fallen headlong into a dark future. To me, one of the most crushing sights from the lockdown has been columns of tired, hungry people walking because there’s no public transport.

And then there’s another quintessentially Indian problem, albeit a more privileged one. A lot of us never move out of our parents’ home (or stay there late into our adulthood). For many, the forced stay-at-home routine is making this coexistence - which can be tense at the best of times - very difficult and filled with anxiety. Three weeks cooped up with your parents, readying for the apocalypse, can be an interminably long time. It can feel like you are trapped between a war outside and a war inside.

I didn’t really have any wise words for the person who contacted me on Twitter (I have been away from my parents’ home for 20 years). But if you have any good ideas, let me know and I’ll pass ’em on.

The Correspondent’s contextual guide to the pandemic

Thankfully, on The Correspondent there’s been no shortage of good advice on how to maintain sanity in these strange times. If you haven’t already seen it, I am talking about where the editorial teams of The Correspondent and our Dutch sister site De Correspondent have been curating the most helpful writing and resources from the web to help you put the pandemic in context.

The guide is updated daily with some terrific journalism, and it has been a real blessing for my frayed nerves, struggling at once with too much information and not enough reliable information.

So, I thought I’d share with you a few pieces from our corona guide that you may find worth your while. Each of them sheds light on a stark new psychological reality that’s taking a hammer to the world as we knew it:

  1. The deadly disease puts a moral onus on us to care for others – a reminder that, for better or worse, we are all connected.
  2. If the measures we’re taking to fight the coronavirus work, they’ll look excessive later on. But the alternative is worse.
  3. rapid review of the evidence.
  4. We need to take both social distancing and the “social recession” it will cause seriously.
  5. [Self-plug] The failure of leadership and the indifferent public behaviour we saw in the early days of the pandemic were the symptom of a malfunction in one of the human species’ greatest built-in safety nets: anxiety.

I hope these five pieces help answer some of your questions about the New Normal. If they do, please share them liberally.

Stay safe, and see you next week.

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