Pandemic and health: Covid19, a challenge that can recover humanity

by Marilena Sperlinga

The numbers are pressing. The pandemic is the Damocles‘ sword that hangs over our heads, reinvigorating atavistic fears and driving humanity away from human contact.

Fear is our companion, but also a self-defense. The spirit of survival takes the most unthinkable forms. During this surreal period we have seen the most fragile balances break, shatter and we have witnessed an increase in Mandatory Medical Treatments MMT .

This summer the governor of Veneto Zaia proposed the MMT for those who refused, finding themselves positive, to go into quarantine, but the instrumental use of the TSO has little to do with the real discomfort of those who live reality in an often amplified way, some sometimes distorted and above all it has little to do with the real suffering that lies behind a full-blown mental illness and which usually affects entire families.

Whether it’s called Covid19 or a pandemic, it has undoubtedly had a disruptive effect on our mental health and if the lockdown has generated the so-called hut syndrome, when the numbers press fear it becomes an absolute reference and a reference in the collective imagination’s lifeline.

Our liquid society, so inclined to be flexible and in step with the times, adapts and changes shape, we are facing a new way of conceptualizing health, the psychic and mental one in some ways are less important.

It is necessary to scale and the priority today is Covid 19. The most fragile souls suffer loneliness and distances that become chasms, without any social control in some cases they literally go adrift.

Someone has advanced fatal hypotheses, almost defining new areas of business and the Citizens’ Committee for Human Rights, a non-profit organization that denounces abuses in the psychiatric field, wanted to underline the attempt to medicalize some human reactions which, it must be said in order misunderstandings, they are very normal reactions to emergency and out of control situations.

They are all consequences or hypotheses of consequences, generated by an unpublished novel that has become routine for months. The hospitals. The sick, more or less serious, are alone, isolated, but constantly monitored, the tampons must be done and are done, but the sick remain alone, without the comfort of a friendly presence.

The community reacts, but not for everyone the so-called restrictions of freedom are tolerable or tolerated, the institutions impose limits and establish practices, for some they are abuses.

The choices are always the result of either Either-or, on the one hand you win, on the other you lose.

The school Intermediate solutions between Face Hand Space and class work, contingent recreations and few contacts with more distant classmates.

The school as a agent of socialisation is forced to a different role, teaching, even that, no longer becomes a priority. Smartworking is useful and productive and makes us to all intents and purposes more European, but the school represents something different and has a different function.

Without necessarily reaching pathological extremes, the so-called Hikikomori, our children are experiencing a reality that makes them more vulnerable and makes them more alone.

In Campania the governor is reaching out for the closure of all schools, and it is once again Covid that dictates the rules. The domino effect could be that of a mystified lockdown, especially in the case of the little ones, but the point is that the school loses ground and importance, that teaching disappears and that our children are confronted with a totally new reality.

A reality that finds everyone unprepared, but which sometimes drastically defines new dynamics for people who are, to all intents and purposes, in the making.

The formula “everything will be okay” has been a mantra that has made us united and compact in hope, but the effects of what we have lived and are experiencing must not be overlooked.

We need to be prepared for the aftermath, we need to talk and make sure that our view of health is not partial or shortsighted. The dimension of being human is something more complex than statistical surveys and more or less alarming numbers, we need to learn to defend ourselves from the virus, but also from the virulent effects of a society that is dehumanizing.