Melania Rizzoli
The psychological distress suffered by the Italian population during the Covid 19 epidemic is slowly waning, and the first signs of a slowdown were observed already before the summer thanks to thepositive and therapeutic effect that immunization has had on mental health. The worsening of psychological disorders caused by the rapidity and violence with which the Coronavirus hit and killed millions of Italians, together with the consequences of the prolonged lockdowns, have had important repercussions on mental health for months, and in all age groups. , with the appearance of anxiety, depression, self-harm and negative thoughts, with dysphoric and paranoid attitudes, especially on the most fragile and vulnerable personalities, those who have had greater difficulties in dealing with the pandemic trauma, who have experienced a continuous concern that has radically polarized the mentally, with a strong impact on the emotional brain, which it determined a use and abuse of tranquilizers and sleeping pills to cope with acute and chronic Covid stress.
HOPE RETURNS
Coronavirus vaccines have instead rekindled hope, restored confidence, and the population is beginning to feel more positive about the future and confident that they are on the way out towards safety, towards liberation from the nightmare, with the desire to return to fully live the days after the catastrophic effects suffered in the previous months, and with the almost full scientific certainty, confirmed by epidemiological data, of being now far from the risk of lethal infections or new isolations. In the history of medicine all natural disasters and pandemics have always been a threat to mental health especially in people with sleep and personality disorders, and in patients with pre-existing psychiatric symptoms and emotional frailties; but in this recent epidemic the reactive differences have made them the prolonged uncertainties for the lack of adequate treatment against an unknown and aggressive virus, for the lack of experimentation of therapeutic solutions in the first months of the pandemic, for the only preventive remedy which is it was the medieval quarantine, due to the unpreparedness of health systems, due to too many scientific information conflicting with each other, together with an anxious and non-reassuring institutional communication, which sent thousands of brains into a tailspin, which found themselves in confusion, in a prolonged state of uncertainty, in emotional and physical isolation for fear of contagion, and which triggered a series of conflicting psychic reactions, reaching the point of non-compliance or even the rejection of public health directives, like what happens in all cases of post-traumatic stress.
Unlike this, however, that of the pandemic was an individual, unconventional, persistent and perturbing stress that evolved in subtle ways, characterized by an effort to adapt to the risk of deadly contagion, associated with a heavy psycho-social and economic commitment to resisting damage management, which has disrupted the idea of the future and undermined mental health. Vaccines have, on the contrary, rebalanced the psychic laws that regulate thoughts, emotions and behaviors, causing the moments of suffering experienced, the images of the sick who they died in solitude, of the unmade faces of health workers destroyed by fatigue and pain, to remove the vision of the thousands of coffins brought to burn, to forget the annihilating silence of the cities, and mass vaccination has transformed disbelief, fear, terror and agonizing thinking in a collective defensive behavior of help and sharing, which has led to improving individual resistance and strengthening actions towards the goal of returning to the normal flow of life, made up of constructive and planning reactions. Vaccines have given strength and vigor to the ability to psychologically manage even emotional and economic losses, projecting us towards the need to recover the possibility of redesigning the future for a return to normalcy.
MANAGE LOSSES
The feelings of helplessness, misperception of symptoms, fears of not having adequate protection, fear of physical contact, kisses and hugs, have disappeared, because vaccines have reactivated the adaptive plasticity of the brain, one of the most vital properties important of the human mind, which strongly pushes the survival instinct. George Orwell wrote that “mental integrity has no relation to statistics”, but the data published by the WHO on the improvement of world mental health in the post-pandemic thanks to mass vaccination are irrefutable, and should convince that unruly minority to the preventive serum, still angry, rebellious, disturbed and protesting, to join the campaign, because when reality has shown itself in its crudeness no longer eludable, with millions of deaths that today would be alive with the vaccine, there is no resistance that holds, if not that of serious scientific ignorance.
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