“The next wave of corona virus infections will be primarily psychological,” said psychiatrist Mustafa Hussein in a short interview during the preparation of this report. The pandemic has imposed physical distance measures, different feelings ranging from fear of disease to lack of human communication and a sense of exhaustion from the endless, terrifying news.
For most of us, the world has shrunk to become the same size as the home. The sudden disconnection from life, as we have known it, created a tremendous sense of anxiety. Routine encourages reassurance, and losing it makes depression easy. Turbulence in the world is offset by turmoil in our minds, and between the two disturbances we try to maneuver isolation, fear and sense of idleness, and discover how to live with turmoil.
However, the new temporary feelings for most of those who live now are a reality that has been tested by all those whom medical classifications place under the umbrella of “psychopaths” and “persons with personality disorders”. While the disruption in the world caused by the pandemic provided an opportunity to acknowledge the need to slow the pace of life and accept feelings of fear and feelings of idleness, this was not the previous case in which we spoke with them in this report.
Here, three individuals share aspects of their daily life under Corona: They talk about their personal disorders and their interaction with the turmoil of the world around them, and about the daily maneuvers to continue.
Ali *, 33, starts his day normally. He drinks breakfast, drinks coffee, and smokes one or more cigarettes in the balcony, before going down to the street sun. He just stands enjoying the sun and staying in a room, before returning to his room again. He might spend some time on a mobile game before working a little home. He takes lunch and leaves his room at the end of the day to run in the adjacent streets. He returns again before the curfew begins, to make a long call to his companion residing in another country. He works a little before he sleeps.
This is the best version of Ali’s days, but another version is much worse, when its space between the bed and the balcony shrinks, and its activities are limited to smoking, drinking coffee and sleeping attempts, without the ability or desire to communicate with anyone, or movement Beyond those few meters.
During the pandemic’s time, it took a huge effort from Ali, and lots of distraction exercises as well, just to reach that formula: waves of anxiety produced by “bad days”, before they retreated a little to allow good / normal days, and then the cycle repeated again.
“Over the course of my sick history, this is the worst moment ever,” Ali describes to “Mada Masr” over the past weeks. His medical history is a period of more than 10 years since he was diagnosed with a “delusion disease” accompanied by depression and anxiety disorder. Illusion of the disease causes the owner to visualize the symptoms of disease, and sometimes feel as though they are real, to create all of this fear of permanent loss of life.
Initially, with the first weeks of the spread of the Coruna virus, there was a state of fear and anxiety that swallowed any other concerns of Ali. Later, “with the realization that the whole world is living in the same crisis, and that there is no near exit, the fear associated with Corona begins to interact with all other fears,” thus describing the development of the feeling of fear.
The reaction between Corona’s fear and “illusion of illness” takes forms such as thinking about a heart attack scenario, an ancient obsession with Ali, which is prompted by another step that he thinks about not being able to go to the hospital for fear of infection with the Coronavirus, which will lead to his death alone. at home.
Another scenario is that depression and permanent anxiety affect his immunity, which makes him more vulnerable in the face of infection with the Coronavirus. This scenario increases feelings of anxiety, which increases weakening immunity, which increases the chances of contracting the virus, and so on.
Ali is a journalist. Here he explains how this affects his ability to deal with the pandemic, saying: “I am busy, forcing me to follow the social media all the time, at a time when everyone treats himself as a WHO representative, and all people publish news about high infection rates everywhere in The world, the new symptoms of the virus, and the interaction of the disease with smokers, and thus the result of this, I begin myself feeling symptoms, whether cough or difficulty breathing ».
Without access to any of the various forms of psychological support, the task of dealing with all of these feelings becomes more difficult. Ali says he is no longer able to meet friends due to the physical spacing procedures, and psychotherapy sessions have stopped because most psychiatric clinics have been closed down as the virus has spread, and Ali does not feel comfortable at all online treatment sessions. This is explained by the fact that it does not achieve the same degree of communication with the processor, nor does it feel safe to use applications such as “Zoom” for example to talk through it in the most accurate details of his personal life.
Ali’s life may not be much different now from the past two years in her isolation, he says, but the difference here is in the choice or his absence, “When this is imposed on you by the logic of fear, there is something different. I do not fear anyone will stop you and punish you when you leave the house. No, it’s a fear that you get sick and die. ”
Ali describes the Corona virus as making us live a life-like condition under totalitarian regimes: “You will not meet your companions nor your family, and if you meet them you will not greet them and not cuddle them. As you wear a muzzle and try not to touch any need and think about permanently the distance between you and the rest of the passers-by, and you will return to the house before 8 o’clock at night to preventTo roam. ”
The life reproduced by the virus is «free from any entertainment or social life. In short, the virus turns us into machines in the form of Communist Party youth, Mao Zedong. This does not happen because someone has imposed life on you, but the result of self-censorship is more difficult. ”
“Waiting for calamity is the hardest thing for a person with borderline personality disorder. And I was feeling all the time I was waiting for death. “I had a feeling that we are at the end of the world and we will see tragic events.” The sense of the end of the world began with Shaima *, 30, with the Egyptian government announcing, in mid-March, that the study be suspended, then the movement of airports and the number of workers in the country would be reduced.
Shaimaa had already taken several decisions, prior to the state’s actions, to protect her three daughters. She decided to keep them at home, and the nanny was given leave for the duration of the crisis, and she stayed home to care for the children.
“Normally, I can’t do without a nanny,” she says, “because it is very possible for a period of 10 days that she remains unable to do anything due to an acute wave of mood change.” At that time, the governess was essential to their care. But in the end, I was forced to dispense with her services at this time, because I do not want her to stay at home every day, install transportation and retire with girls. ”
Although previous government decisions brought her some calm at first, because she felt that her fear throughout the weeks prior to those decisions was justified, the scenes of pharmacies being free of personal protection tools and crowding out in supermarkets to buy different household necessities once again terrified her.
Shaima has been spinning on pharmacies in an attempt to buy alcohol for sterilization, and in her imagination that fear of foodstuffs disappearing from the shops, adding to previous fears of a member of her family being infected with the virus, or the lack of sufficient money for her to cope with a long period of not working, or worsening the situation Year because of the pandemic and the stage of economic collapse.
“It was the monster that creates excessive thinking,” she says. At that time, Bigelie had many suicidal thoughts. ” Shaima explains that the thoughts motivating the ending of life in such circumstances become more frequent while waiting for a misfortune not to occur, but the continuous and long treatment rounds she went through helped her overcome this stage and control her thoughts. Moreover, it causes Borderline personality disorder Its owner has violent and rapid mood changes up and down. In a general climate full of panic, it takes a double effort to control mood changes.
For the past weeks, Shaima has tried to keep herself and her daughters busy all the time, to avoid leaving any room for anxiety, thinking about the future, or feeling bored. In addition to the household chores she usually asks her daughters to help her with in her performance, she tries to discover new ways to entertain in the evening, such as tinting empty bottles, or trying to make an Araujus theater out of cardboard boxes, or other handcraft.
Shaima’s continuous attempts to create a daily routine for girls and keep them away from boredom reduce the time available to spend with themselves, Especially with insufficient help from other family members. She explains: “In the first, the girls slept at 8 o’clock at night and woke up at 6 in the morning, so I had a day from 8 to 12 o’clock at night for myself. Now, that time has completely disappeared because the girls’ daily routine has completely ended with his satisfaction. ” Shaimaa tries again to restore the routine of her life and that of her family, but she faces resistance from children, which increases the disorder of the day and the feeling of exhaustion and tension.
Compounding Shaima’s sense of stress is the difficulty in reaching psychological support during these times. With the closure of psychiatric clinics, only online psychotherapy sessions are available, which are running at a slower Internet speed, with the pressure of isolated users at home. In the end, you may have to complete the session on the phone, without being able to see her doctor, which reduces the feeling of communication.
In addition to individual therapy sessions, Shaima participates in periodic meetings of one of the treatment groups. Before the pandemic, attending group meetings was fun for her. Where she spends about two and a half hours among a group of peers who have become friends with the passage of time. With the shift to remote meetings, new problems have arisen. Some participants do not have the luxury of privacy in their homes, in addition to the increased tension and anxiety of most of the group members, which makes controlling the meeting very difficult and exhausting.
Amidst all this hustle and bustle, despite Shaima’s difficulties, Shaima tries to take inspiration from attempts to care for herself with a sense of value and self-worth, not necessarily dependent on what she produces. She decided to temporarily postpone any work-related projects, after she felt angry at all the calls on social media to take advantage of the time of home isolation in a “productive” manner. It says “this is the time to survive” and nothing more.
She compared this to her feeling towards the times before the pandemic: “The whole time, the world was feeling me that I needed to work more to prove that I was sharing, the length of time needed to run, because the world itself is buggy, and I am not standing. If at any time I was tired, my individual problem would remain, and it is not another problem, ”she added,“ but now the whole world is sitting … and it turns out that it helps normal sleep. ”
Isolation, loneliness, turmoil and a lack of human contact with others are the features of life that the Corona pandemic has imposed on many people. The situation may seem exceptional to many, but for Elaine * it is different.
Eileen wrote the following lines a few days before she spoke to Mada Masr:Our likes of people who suffer from mental illness do not need the nightmare of the end of the world to feel that their lives are disrupted time and time again, especially in a world that only recognizes one type of nervous system work, a world that imposes a sense of shame and marginalization always because we do not produce the way required of us. Our proverbs who are not heterosexuals suffer daily to communicate with each other, because we live in a world and among people who always try to keep us far apart, with the same hostility and insistence of a pandemic.».
This does not mean that living in a time of pandemic makes the daily experience for Eileen similar to previous years. On the contrary, the experience becomes more difficult for two reasons, according to what she explains: the first is that she is ill with bipolar disorder, and the second is that she Coir [ذوو الهويات الجندرية غير النمطية].
“Naturally, I am making an effort to be accepted into the world,” Eileen says. I have to monitor my mood changes every day, my sleep hours, the rate of acceleration of my thoughts, I must make sure that I do my workout exercises, I regulate the doses of the medicine, I do not have psychotic symptoms. I feel like living in an army camp. This is my normal life. ”
What Eileen describes, 40 years working in the field of educationIn the previous paragraph, it is the procedures that it imposes on itself in normal times, only to meet the requirements of the world, including: to remain productive, coherent, and stable, with the least possible turbulence. The pandemic adds to all of the above another layer of “collective anxiety and panic,” says Eileen. However, it is already exhausting from everything that it does in normal days, and in no way bears adding this layer of panic, or imposing more control on itself.
“I do not deal with this situation alone. I also deal with the human geography of human circles that suffer in one way or another. Imagine how much effort I or others have done to make sure that people close to me are in circles Al-Quiriyyah [ذوي الهويات الجندرية غير النمطية] Or in psychiatric circles there are two good things, not collapsing, and Bilaqu has enough support. ”Eileen describes the additional burden of Corona.
But the most angry thing about Eileen is that the world now only realizes that “it is acceptable that they fear isolation, it is acceptable that they remain frustrated or depressed, acceptable that they can not produce it.” Eileen does not think that it is fair for the world to celebrate the wisdom that it only learned during the time of the pandemic, while not paying attention to the fact that the feelings of fear now not being produced, isolated, or losing contact are passing through it are the daily feelings of those suffering from mental illness while dealing with the requirements of the world Who does not necessarily see their needs.
She explains this by saying, “I am my life, no one said that normal, I am not productive, no one said that it is acceptable that I remain depressed and tired of isolation […] As if the issue was a need for a pandemic in the world so people understood this after two months, but from isolation, while I lived my whole life by trying to save this for myself.
And you see that the “world” will not learn from that experience how to change its laws and frameworks to become more inclusive for different people, nor will it change to become more open to people in all their diversity, it will be closer to a temporary period, and soon the world will return to the foregoing. In the end, Eileen sees that “Mahdesh says that I have experienced the feeling of isolation now, because I sympathize with people who were isolated before that, or I experienced the feeling of fear of being ostracized. I sympathize with people who were feeling ostracized. The speech is still centered on the experiences of heterosexuals and is convinced of the existence of a single nervous pattern. As if we did not have a place in the world, and we would prefer a place in the world ».
Eileen concludes by saying: “Part of me does not want the pandemic to end and life returns to normal. I have a chance now to say that I am not just the rhythm because I do not walk with the world, you too. Therefore, I will seize the opportunity and take my full right from the time before the pandemic. Leave my mind on myself, put less pressure on my soul, and allow myself to remain less productive …
* The names mentioned in the report and some personal details are not true to keep the sources private.
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