Marine Area: “Why we have to keep talking about mental health”

It is useless to go around it, the last two years have marked us and the Coronavirus will remain in the historical memory of this country forever. This virus crept into our lives with disarming speed and gradually people began to float through different emotional states.

Since the beginning of the first lockdown, I have tried to protect myself and those around me as best I can: I vaccinate myself, use protective devices, limit my contacts during periods of greatest contagion. In these years I have known the loss, the lack of control, the helplessness, the inexorable heaviness of waiting.

Social media, which have always fed on human impulses, do nothing but exploit these emotional states by giving the best of themselves through controversy, a riot of hashtags that follow the visceral trend of people and indignant reactions in the continuous search for the culprit of the moment. . I often feel like I’m living in a middle ground, in a limbo where everything is filtered through a screen.

This most of the time throws me into despair but it does not surprise me, it is inevitable that such a sudden change in our lives is a source of great frustration and affects people’s mental health. What amazes me, however, is the lack of institutional consideration towards the emotional sphere and psychic distress, as demonstrated by the exclusion of the “psychological bonus” from the budget law. In a period of crisis it is always the maneuvers that affect the psychological area that pay the price, considered secondary to those of a “practical” nature. Yet research conducted in October 2021 by the Piepoli Institute for the National Council of the Order of Psychologists (CNOP) showed that the pandemic had a heavy impact on the mental health of the population. According to the report 21% of patients discontinued treatment for economic reasons, while 27.5% of people did not even start it, again for economic reasons. Among the requests received, those related to anxiety problems (+ 83%), mood / depression (+ 72%), and the adolescent sphere (+ 62%) are increasing. Users have also changed during the pandemic, young people between 18 and 24 years of age made the greatest request for psychological support, women and people with an average level of education.

Not that things were booming before Covid, it is clear, but in these two years the pandemic has managed to mark with a fluorescent orange highlighter all unsolved government problems.

Let us realize that for the moment ours is still a provisional freedom inside and outside the houses, that the only way to improve things is for those who move the ranks of this country to learn to listen to people and their needs. Because perhaps the only possibility to mitigate the damage of this mess is to understand that we are part of the community, that we are a single pulsating mass, that everything that hurts me hurts you too, in a way you may not even imagine.