Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/10/one-in-5-people-who-get-covid-19-experience-mental-illness-within-90-days-study-reports.html
…
4 Likes
To be fair “anxiety, depression and insomnia” aren’t exactly rare conditions these days. How does that 20% diagnosis rate compare with the general population in this pandemic-ridden Trumpscape?
42 Likes
By that diagnosis I must have contracted COVID in the mid 80’s.
13 Likes
The stress of uncertainty around physical side effects, wow
4 Likes
Anxiety, depression, insomnia, and ultimately dementia are also indicative of B12 deficiency (ask me how I know). B12 as part of a basic supplementation combo with D and magnesium has shown to reduce covid-19 severity.
9 Likes
They don’t seem to take into any consideration the side effects of some medicines given to Covid patients.
My girlfriend and I caught it near the end of October and (fingers crossed) are in the process of giving it the boot in a week or so. The article completely ignores any medicines side effects, which in my experience are the main reason behind the temporary (hopefully) mental alterations.
When treating Covid19, the #1 goal is to prevent at any cost lung infection; once lungs get damaged there’s no way back, so in my case (luckily my gf had milder syptoms) I was prescribed a huge amount of paracetamol, then cortisone, which did its job, but also is a powerful steroid that literally fucks up your brain. The dosage I was prescribed was something I never took in my entire life, and I had some nasty hospital experiences like almost being killed by a peritonitis (paired with an idiot doctor) and some bad motorcycle accidents.
Anyway, for days I couldn’t sleep and became irritable to the point me and my girlfriend, both Covid positive and quarantined, were yelling at each other most of the day and nearly broke up before the doctor reduced that shit dosage.
Those medicines are effective, but they definitely have their share of side effects that should be taken into account.
21 Likes
Yeah, I was going to say - 20% of people with a psychiatric disorder? You’d get that just by living under the Trump administration, never mind also living with a pandemic. That number doesn’t seem so far off the baseline for the general population these days.
(I was reading an article about “long covid,” the lengthy covid symptoms many infected people have, and how it’s difficult to distinguish the causes, e.g. any direct neurological impacts of the infection versus the effect of having PTSD after having been on a ventilator or otherwise being seriously ill…)
I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m starting to have severe impacts from worrying about the physical side effects, and I don’t even have covid (yet). Everything new I read adds something new to worry about. I just saw someone on Twitter talking about how her teenage son had it, and now his teeth are falling out because of some vascular damage…
From what I’ve read, it seems like if your symptoms were mild, especially after 90 days, the odds are very good that you’ll be fine. There are some things you might want to keep an eye on, for a while (heart and lung health), but it seems like, for whatever reason, some people are luckier with the impact it has on them. Sadly Trump seems to be one of those people…
All the news about it shuts down that argument (not that it’s really an argument to begin with). So many people who aren’t fine after 90 days. Proof of reinfection in some people. Etc. No sane, knowledgeable person is talking about “herd immunity.”
6 Likes
I have a problem with the phrases “mental illness” and “psychiatric disorder”*. How about just 1 in 5 people who get covid have psychological symptoms including anxiety and depression. Its a viral illness, and mental and physical health are intricately connected causing psychological symptoms.
*to be clear this complaint is lodged toward the field of psychiatry not Xeni’s post
9 Likes
They’re talking about “natural selection” but they have the two things conflated. Perhaps because they don’t really understand either of them?
2 Likes
A lot, it was explained.
2 Likes
i definitely noticed my lungs being the worst hit from my time with it (aside from the loss of senses of taste and smell – those have come back partially, and i still have hopes they will return close to if not 100% eventually), not sure about my heart, but i can at least FEEL how well i can breathe. i’d be fine if this was it, but we’re still learning about long-term effects of this.
it doesn’t stop the idea from continually being pushed around, though. i know it’s madness (“hey, let’s sacrifice millions of people on a chance the rest of us will be ok!”), but it’s on-par for 2020 and trumpism.
5 Likes
Including by a few doctors, which totally blows my mind. They should absolutely know better. Maybe they do, but they’re secretly nihilists…
2 Likes
My old commute used to go by a hospital and I was always shocked at how many doctors and nurses were outside in the smoking area everyday (this was before covid).
5 Likes
Per Xeni’s quote from the article “This was about twice as likely as for other groups of patients in the same period, the researchers said.”
Also “the researchers also found significantly higher risks of dementia, a brain impairment condition.”
So yeah, that’s bad. Very bad.
5 Likes
In fairness, if the phrase used was “cardiac illness” or “pulmonary disorder” it would not raise an eyebrow. The idea that somehow alterations in the function of one organ system (the brain) are categorically different from alterations in functions of heart, lungs or kidneys needs needs to go away. Treating these differently and stigamtizing one of them is part of how we got the disastrous mental health system we have now.
12 Likes
Agree completely. I think there is a misunderstanding between us, because my issue is that I think psychiatry treats them differently which causes problems and leads to stigmatizing mental issues. If they were talking about “brain illness” or “neuronal disorders” which would be the better analogy to cardiac or pulmonary I wouldn’t have a problem. A “psychological disorder” is in no way the same as a neuronal disorder though.
Anxiety, depression, and insomnia (the listed symptoms) are all systemic issues. Neither the physiological changes that caused them nor the way to treat them is necessarily in the brain.
I think simultaneously claiming that things like depression be described as inherent parts of a personality while also being called a disorder or disease is inherently stigmatizing.
In short, I think that the field of psychiatry deserves 90% of the credit for
3 Likes
Addictions are hard to kick, no matter how much you know they’re bad for you. But I’ve seen some doctors who were just dumb, and lacking basic science/medical knowledge that I would have assumed would be impossible to avoid (which suggested they had, in fact, rejected that information). My assumption that doctors were all reasonably smart people has been thoroughly deflated over the years.
3 Likes
Yes, after all, medical folk are human and just as susceptible as anyone to unhealthy or addictive behavior. I guess this shows my professional bias. Plenty of other professionals wouldn’t surprise me to see some of them do something contrary to their professional recommendations.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
