Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine generate anxiety in the population

Despite the apparent improvement in the Covid pandemic situation in Brazil and in the world, the effects of the health crisis on the mental health of the population continue to exist.

An analysis by the WHO (World Health Organization) released this month showed that cases of anxiety increased 25.6%, and severe depressive disorder, 27.6%, during the pandemic – which officially began on March 11, 2020. .

To make matters worse, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the most serious military conflicts in Europe since World War II, has brought new fears to the population, including fears of a nuclear war.

According to the WHO study, which mostly considered surveys from the first year of the pandemic, the increase in mental disorders was greater in countries with a high number of infections or with severe mobility restrictions. Young women were most affected, as well as health professionals who had a higher rate of burnout and exhaustion.

For the psychologist and executive director of Bee Touch, a mental health startup, and a member of the Covid-19 group at the Brazilian Society of Psychology, Ana Carolina Peuke, the pandemic was not just a health crisis, but a humanitarian crisis. , with an impact on mental health”.

“Mental health is a historically neglected area in terms of investment, and the pandemic served as a catalyst for this. The problems already existed, they were potentiated during the crisis”, he explains.

And, as in a war situation, the pandemic causes a psychic exhaustion, which is when there is a continuous release of stress hormones. “It’s like a panic button that is permanently on, with the release of cortisol [hormônio do estresse] in continuous peaks. This generates major psychological burnout,” she says.

The professor at the Federal University of the South and Southeast of Pará (Unifesspa), Caio Maximiano Oliveira, considers that this psychological suffering can translate, currently, into exhaustion. “Not only from the restrictions that the pandemic has brought to everyday life, but also from all the reconfigurations we have had to face. If, at the beginning of the pandemic, despite all the suffering there was hope for the world to come out better, two years later we are too exhausted to it,” he says.

Even with the advance of vaccination and the relaxation of protective measures, which is something positive from a psychological point of view, the return to pessimism is triggered by the situation in Ukraine, he assesses.

For the psychoanalyst and professor at the Institute of Psychology at USP Christian Dunker, both the pandemic and the war in Eastern Europe have another element in common, which is the fear of contagion: in the first case, by the coronavirus, and in the second, by contamination after a atomic bombardment.

“War entered people very quickly, with the fear of contagion, the danger posed by the other. And, in this case, it is something less palpable because contamination by radioactivity can take years to be felt”, he says.

For many of its patients, Covid would have brought an idea of ​​strong union between countries around the common good, which was to fight the enemy – the coronavirus -, with the production of vaccines, but the current military crisis puts this down. .

“Everyone believed that some kind of intervention would take place to stop the enemy who is now the [presidente russo, Vladimir] Putin, at least in his intimates and in his fantasies, and as this has not yet come to fruition, he causes a lot of harm to people”, evaluates the psychoanalyst.

The Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine have another characteristic in common: “ontological” insecurity, according to Oliveira, or the total extinction of the population in the face of a threat related to the environment or the preservation of species.

“If there is something that seems to define anxiety, it is uncertainty about the future, and this may also be linked to climate change”, says Oliveira.

For Dunker, the perception in the popular imagination that an environmental catastrophe is possible is more concrete and generates more anxiety than small changes in daily life, such as paying bills on time, recycling garbage, living healthier.

“It’s easier to imagine that Ukraine will detonate an atomic bomb than to change what is predictable,” he says.

Asked what actions he recommends to reduce anxiety, the psychoanalyst says that creating false expectations and excess control should be avoided so as not to cause more anguish.

“Reading and getting informed, learning better about the topic, understanding the contradictory spaces – without considering a binary division between good and bad – and reflecting on how this impacts your life, are some of the guidelines I would give a patient. And humility, because even science does not have the answers to everything. Tomorrow, a new variant of the virus may appear and we need to be able to control these anxieties in order to respond to them quickly”, he says.