Mental Health in the Face of a Pandemic

How those of us with mental illness fare when the world is on fire.

I am bipolar. I don’t hide that fact anymore and have written a lot about it. My illness comes with a lot of fun bells and whistles: manic streaks, seasonal depression (on top of the regular depression), and a mountain of anxiety.

That last one has, to some degree, become a feature of many of us with mental illness, regardless of whether it is a symptom of our illness or not. We are anxious about our illnesses. We are anxious that we will be outed and ostracized. Stigma makes us all paranoid to some degree. Nobody wants to be seen as crazy.

The anxiety and paranoia are currently messing with me. My natural introversion and mild dislike of the general public have been amped up quite a lot lately. It’s one thing to not like being around a lot of people. It’s another thing when a lot of people could mean a death sentence.

I’m not particularly germaphobic, but I now wash my hands for 20 seconds religiously (my preferred mental timer is the Team Rocket speech from Pokemon, recited in a slow, dramatic fashion). I sanitize my cart handles at the grocery store, along with my hands both coming and going. My immune system is pretty robust, but I’m not taking chances.

I even take precautions around “safe” people, like my coworkers. It’s easy for me since I spend most of my time in my office anyway, but it still nags at me. This will be less of an issue since I’ll soon be working from home, but I’m still a bit paranoid about it. It’s starting to feel like nobody is safe.

I expect that in the coming weeks, I will be much more inclined to stay home for long periods. This is a blessing and a curse. I am an introvert by nature, so spending time away from large groups of people sounds fantastic. On the other hand, I suspect I’ll go stir crazy fairly quickly, as being tethered to one place also makes me anxious.

The constant stream of pandemic news won’t help. I expect I will have a lovely view from the comfort of my couch as the world burns, as Facebook feeds me apocalyptic news and my phone updates me with the latest breathless article. All the late-night comedians will be serious for a moment before getting to the jokes about our impending demise, while my millennial friends wonder why the end of the world is taking so long.

The anxiety is already starting to eat me a little. Fresh off my seasonal depression and amped up by work stress, I’ve been a bit on-edge and snappish. Things that don’t normally bother me are incredibly frustrating now. Everything feels like a chore.

My wife has noticed as well. She was happy to “have me back,” as I tend to become distant when I’m stressed or depressed, but she mentioned that I’ve been slipping away again. I know I don’t particularly care for anxiety and paranoia, but I really don’t care for it when it affects my home life.

As I mentioned, a lot of people with mental illness deal with anxiety, whether it’s in their diagnosis or not. Right now, I can’t get a really good gauge of how the mental illness community is doing because the Facebook group I rely on for that metric has banned all mentions of coronavirus.

I imagine a lot of us are frightened. Those of us who live in America know just how broken our healthcare system is, having to deal with it regularly. Many of us hate hospitals and doctors, places where we get overcharged for an underwhelming but vital service. Even people like me, who are relatively stable and only need maintenance more than anything, balk at the thought of the American healthcare system.

The anxiety around going to the doctor notwithstanding, there’s also a distrust of the general public that doesn’t help things. We often recognize that people in large groups make dumb decisions and rush to judgment. We face the results of that in the stigma around our conditions.

As such, watching the general public get into fistfights over toilet paper and avoid being near each other is almost cathartic in how awful it is. When some people avoid you like the plague because of how your brain is wired, it’s kinda funny when they avoid you like the plague because they think you’ve got the plague.

Even so, this behavior does feed our general anxiety around people. When you deal with paranoia every day, it’s made worse when you think you’re going to get beaten up over a package of wet wipes.

A lot of people I’ve known who live with mental illness have some level of obsessive behavior as well. It may not be full-flung Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but our tendencies towards compulsion are a bit stronger than many others.

So, I imagine that a lot of us will start hoarding supplies if we haven’t already. Why stock up for 14 days of quarantine when we can stock for a month or two? Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts say.

On the flip side, the tendency to have a clean, orderly space will be threatened by a viral invader. Weekly cleanings may shift to daily, and not washing your hands for 20 seconds becomes a capital offense.

All the while, our anxiety will be riding high. People, in particular large groups of people, cannot be trusted. Public spaces are no-go territory. Any and every possible surface could contain our doom.

For me, my anxiety is starting to get the better of me. My stress levels have skyrocketed in the past few days, and a mild paranoia has taken hold.

Considering my last two articles were about self-care, how I’ve fallen down on it, and how I can pick myself back up, I need to start taking my own advice a bit. That means doing things for fun that are for me and only me. I’d like to get back into my ukulele, and my wife suggested that I pick up a video game or two.

I’m also getting into audiobooks as a means of passing time. Initially suggested as something to listen to in the car that isn’t news or music, I suspect that they will help me pass time a bit more easily. As someone who doesn’t read many books anymore, it has helped me get into an author that my wife and several of my friends enjoy.

I also plan to write more fun things in the next few weeks — hopefully, things that I enjoy and not musings on depression and pandemics. I came up with the idea for a novel a while ago, so I may give that a shot.

One thing that I need to recognize is that the world is full of good people as well as bad. For every punch thrown over hand sanitizer, someone is passing out bottles to neighbors. I’m part of a neighborhood group on Facebook, and the outpouring of people doing random acts of kindness gives me hope.

For all my brain tries to yell at me about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there is a lot of good here, both among my immediate friend group and in the world at large. Anxiety, stress, and paranoia will be there, yes, but so too will hope and happiness.

For those of you who deal with mental illness, try not to lose hope. I know that a global pandemic is just one more thing that you don’t need, but our lives are defined by one more thing that we don’t need. Sometimes it feels like life just likes to pile on the garbage, and all we can do is muddle through.

But that’s what we’re good at. For people who live fairly normal lives, this could be a world-shaker. For many of us with mental illness, it’s just one more thing. Yeah, we’re getting anxious and stressed, but we get anxious and stressed anytime the word “healthcare” appears in the news, which is a lot. I’m fairly sure that we can handle it. One more thing on a pile of one more things doesn’t add that much weight comparatively.

So, I, as many others like me, will continue to do my best to take care of myself and those close to me. Like all other major life events that threaten to upend our lives, we will power through. It’s what we do.