How coronavirus affects your (mental) health

These people are most severely affected

It’s a catch-22: the groups most at risk of severe illness – the elderly and people with underlying health conditions – are already most susceptible to loneliness and social isolation at the best of times. Although Covid-19 tends to have a less severe effect on children, it may have consequences for them in the longer term.

The long-term impact of Covid-19 on children In: New Scientist (8 April)

Coronavirus may not be having a massive effect on children directly, but the long-term consequences might be deeper than we think, writes Paul Ramchandani, professor of play at Cambridge University.

Children who have to homeschool because of school closures will fare better or worse depending on their parents’ income levels and job security. Those who have access to gardens and bigger homes will do better than those who don’t. And the youngest are the most vulnerable to their environment: if their parents or carers are not doing well, the psychological effect on the children’s well-being can last for years.

There are also reports of domestic violence on the rise. We need to think of new options to create a better outcome for children, writes Ramchandani, even if the risk may not seem so evident. Recommended by Irene Caselli, First 1,000 Days correspondent (3 min reading time) Why Covid-19 is hard on teenagers, and what parents can do to help In: Wired (6 April)

The pandemic isn’t easy for anyone, whether you’re an independent contractor whose income has suddenly dried up, a single person stuck at home alone and struggling with isolation, or a parent trying frantically to juggle home-schooling and working from home.

But teenagers in industrialised countries may be feeling it most fiercely. They grew up in a time of economic prosperity, rapid technological development, and positive prospects for the future. Now everything is suddenly up in the air. Group processes and social contact play a much more prominent role for teenagers than for any other age group – and in the end, social media and smartphones are simply no substitute for hanging out with other teens for hours on end.

And the boredom, oh the boredom! If you’re stuck at home and don’t have much to do, you’ll get bored pretty quickly – and not every 16-year-old has already developed a skill set to cope. Experts say that parents can’t solve it all, but it does help to have compassion, to really listen to your children when they talk about what they’re struggling with, and to validate their feelings.

Sticking to some sort of daily structure – and not letting yourself slump down and give up in front of your kids – is also important. As an adult, you’re still modelling behaviour for your kids. Recommended by Josta van Bockxmeer, Housing correspondent at De Correspondent (8 min reading time)

Follow the best advice to reduce stress and stay healthy

What can you do to prevent loneliness and anxiety? How do you minimise the stress of having your children at home much more than usual? These articles show us healthy suggestions for making it through this period.

Colombians are battling loneliness by writing anonymous letters to each other In: Christian Science Monitor (30 July)

When Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel rained down death and destruction on the Colombian city of Medellín, libraries formed safe spaces from the violence. Thirty years on, the library is once again the center of community in Colombia.

Hundreds of people are writing anonymous letters to strangers to make them feel less lonely in the coronavirus crisis. The idea behind the letters came from Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel ‘Love in Times of Cholera’. Like Márquez’s books have provided solace to millions, that objective is now taken over by the 4,000 libraries in the South American country. Recommended by Riffy Bol, editor at De Correspondent (5 min reading time) What experts told us about preventing suicides caused by the pandemic In: The Correspondent (26 May)

In a previous article, I looked at how the coronavirus is triggering suicides around the world and asked experts and members for strategies to prevent unnecessary deaths after this disaster.

There are four steps we can take: 1. Restrict access to common means of suicide. 2. Empower communities to help lessen the shock of the disaster. 3. Offer narratives of hope that are backed by concrete action. 4. Admit there’s no fix-all approach to stopping suicides. We need both universal and targetted interventions. Update by Tanmoy Goswami, Sanity correspondent (5-6 min reading time) Taking care of yourself – from head to toe In: Washington Post (2 May)

This visualisation by the Washington Post is the closest thing I have found to a wellness checklist. It is almost like guided meditation. You can scroll through a person’s body and find a list of all the elements you should be looking after right now – from head to toe. It includes resources to look after your mental health, but also tips for dyeing your hair and a reminder to move around and don’t overeat while inside. Recommended by Irene Caselli, First 1,000 Days correspondent (5 min reading time) Pandemics obviously cause pessimism. But there’s room for optimism, too In: Human Progress (18 April)

Millions of years of evolution have made us more receptive to bad news than to good news. That’s an important survival skill, but can also be counter-productive – for example during a pandemic, when there’s bad news around every corner – and it’s easy to become despondent, anxious, or intensely pessimistic.

If you’d like to balance out that natural tendency to worry, this is a great time to remember that there are still lots of hopeful things happening in the world – people are still falling in love, having healthy babies, helping others. It’s good to get some perspective, too: covid-19 is an awful virus, but it’s not as bad as the bubonic plague. If you get sick, you might end up in the ICU, but that’s far from inevitable.

If history teaches us anything, it is that we’ve mastered quite a few diseases over the past centuries. Sure, past successes don’t guarantee future results. But optimism is more than justified. Recommended by Lynn Berger, Culture and Clichés correspondent at De Correspondent (8 min reading time) The coronavirus is reminding us that anxiety is good – as long as it doesn’t turn into panic In: The Correspondent (27 March)

Back when we were hunter-gatherers, anxiety alerted us to danger. But from the 19th century onwards, it was stigmatised as a disorder and disease. The beginning of the coronavirus pandemic underlined the useful function of what we now call a disorder. While some world leaders refused to take the threat seriously, people kept partying in clubs and on spring break, spreading the virus to many others.

It’s good to remember that as long as it doesn’t turn into panic, anxiety can be a good thing. By treating our anxiety compassionately and not just as a problem to be overcome, it can be a desirable trait – and even the hallmark of good leadership. Column by Tanmoy Goswami, Sanity correspondent (9-12 min reading time) Overreacting to the coronavirus is nothing to be embarrassed about In: The Atlantic (16 March)

Have you already felt it? That fear that you’ll have to laughingly admit afterwards that you may have gone a bit overboard when you decided to completely stay away from other people?

This is a story about that feeling. We won’t know the results of social distancing for weeks. If the outbreak turns out to be better than predicted, you’ll never know exactly what role your behaviour played – whether you did too little, just enough, or way too much. But imagine the opposite: what if it’s less effective than we hope?

We all know about widespread panic that turned out to be an embarrassing overreaction in retrospect. In 1999, the whole world was gripped by the fear that vital computer networks would collapse if the two-digit codes for the year flipped from 99 to 00. In retrospect, was that panic over nothing? Or were the measures we took simply more than sufficient to prevent things from going horribly wrong? Recommended by Thalia Verkade, Mobility correspondent at De Correspondent (12 min reading time) How to make social distancing less stressful In: The Lancet (26 February)

Scientific research shows that quarantine can have a major detrimental impact on mental health. Similarly, avoiding social contact is going to be quite stressful for a lot of people in the coming weeks. What can you do to make it a little easier for yourself? Give people the feeling that they’re helping others by avoiding physical contact. And be aware that avoiding social contact is a good deed. Recommended by Max van Lent, guest Economics correspondent at De Correspondent (25 min reading time)