Reports suggest that a high proportion of Brits not only disagree with the easing of lockdown restrictions on July 19th (or ever, in some cases) but are also seeking help from mental health organisations due to their anxiety over ‘Freedom Day’. MailOnline has the story.
One in five people are suffering from what experts have dubbed “Covid Anxiety Syndrome”, with people reporting fears of losing control as the restriction rules put in place to protect people from contracting the virus are removed.
Meanwhile, mental health charities have warned of a surge in treatment requests while an opinion poll has revealed half of people want restrictions to remain in place.
Research by the London South Bank University (LSBU), shows that 40% of respondents to a survey avoid touching things in public, and nearly 25% are avoiding being in public places.
Professor Marcantonio Spada from LSBU’s Centre for Addictive Behaviours and Professor Ana Nikčević from Kingston University first identified the concept of Covid Anxiety Syndrome in April 2020.
Their research found that people were developing a particular set of behaviours as a result of their fear of the virus.
Covid Anxiety Syndrome consists of forms of coping such as a constant attention to threat, worry, avoidance and excessive checking, that can keep people locked into a state of continuous anxiety and fear of contracting the virus.
Professor Marcantonio Spada, Professor of Addictive Behaviours and Mental Health at LSBU, said: “Our data indicates that after one month of re-opening of society many people are still struggling with aspects of Covid Anxiety Syndrome, a similar figure to what we previously observed during full lockdown.
“This means that there are still many people who find it difficult to disengage from the Covid threats which may make return to normal daily living harder as restrictions ease.
“Our new findings show how vital it is that people affected by Covid Anxiety Syndrome receive support. Mapping out how we will do this will become a priority for mental health service providers.”
Meanwhile, an opinion poll carried out for the Observer has revealed 50% of people believe Freedom Day should be pushed back.
The poll, of more than 2,000 people, also revealed around 65% will continue to wear masks in shops and supermarkets while 54% will wear them on public transport. …
Research by mental health charities backs up the findings, with Mind reporting that 55% of adults and young people are concerned about seeing and being near others when restrictions ease next week.
Nearly half, 46%, of those who have been vaccinated, say they are still concerned they will catch the virus.
It comes after Mind reported that one in four adults experienced mental distress for the first time during the pandemic, with NHS figures showing an increase in people’s contact with mental health services since March 2020.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
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Why can’t this website do something useful all upcoming lockdown events?
” Therapists Warn Of Rise in Anxiety over the Easing of Restrictions
By Michael Curzon “
Why do you report this? It this now the Lockdown Zealots Website?
It’s often difficult not to get horribly wrapped up in the semantics. As well as the outright propaganda: essentially this is a government editorial. They’re effectively writing this shit. We’re constantly bombarded with serious amounts of scheming, pernicious horror stories about what the public think; how they feel, and what they’d like to happen: supposedly sponsored by charities, polling organisations, NHS departments, etc. etc. It’s fucking Bollocks. Sage psychologists and government quangos write this crap and pretend it’s genuinely what everyone in their attics and cupboards- are actually saying. It’s fucking draining: and it’s supposed to be so !!
Oh for goodness sake, quite frankly I don’t care. From the mountain of shit that has been showered on us for eighteen months I’m supposed to give a flying f**k because some people have actively talked themselves into a ‘syndrome’ of their own making?
sorry but I’m all out of F**ks to give, I’m way too busy giving them to the elderly who have died without their loved ones, and whose lives have been made an abject misery. I’m too busy giving them to all the people who have died because the National Covid Only Service didn’t get around to them, ditto those who are still on waiting lists. I’m too busy giving them to kids whose lives have been turned upside-down and whose schools have tortured them for the last year…..maybe sometime, (never!) I’ll get around to giving a shit about the poor little darlings!
What a nation of wet, spineless wimps the Brits have become. I’m ashamed to be British.
What does ‘British’ mean when all that is required to become British is to drift here on a rubber dinghy? I’m not British; I’m English.
Is this true? I don’t trust polls or any information/propaganda coming out of the mainstream media.My own experience is that people have had enough and want it to end.
It obviously varies greatly. I know plenty of people who are either concerned for themselves or for the country as a whole.
I think you can take a baseline of the very worried as outdoor mask wearers – in my town around 10-15%. I think you can add some in for those who are not worried for themselves but think restrictions should continue in some form (IMO quite a lot of people), and those who hardly come out at all.
Outdoor mask wearing has certainly declined. But that means little in the face of the adherence to what might be called the ‘pub idiocy’ and continued con of pretending that fomite transmission and asymptomatic spread happen. Or that the isolation and vaccination of children is necessary.
I’m afraid belief still outweighs rationality and knowledge by a long chalk.
They may ‘want it to end’ – but that means the imagined virus, which they fully believe in.
boo f**king hoo
My great grandmother was not much botheref by the blitz and never visited an air raid shelter throughout the war, but a passing electrical storm would turn her into a quivering wreck. The public are behaving in a similar way about Covid. There are many aspects of life that cause us anxiety. People need to get a bit of perspective. If you are scared of Covid wear a space suit.
I give up! Today the BBC concentrating on Long Covid! So that’ll help the worried well and rest of the just plain scared witlsss prepare for see use with out masks!
It’s a standard fallback when deaths and hospitalisations fail them and they get bored with “cases”
This is just part of the damage the fortune spent on government fear propaganda and dissemination of distorted statistics has done to our country. Too many naive people don’t do their own research and believe the government lies and distortions.
It’s time the mainstream media spent some effort correcting the damage they have done by repeating the government’s inaccurate information.
looks a bit like PTSD: “constant attention to threat, worry, avoidance and excessive checking, that can keep people locked into a state of continuous anxiety and fear”
We cannot continue to pander to the perennially petrified.
Ultimately they need to get a grip and finally grow up.
Yes indeed but I cannot see any way that’s going to happen. I think the number of perennially petrified is a consequence of very long term trends in the way people approach their lives, trends that have made the coronamadness possible, and obviously covid has accelerated that. It will take many decades, or possibly centuries to undo, and I see no major force that will assist that undoing currently. Quite the opposite.
The deliberate creation of this climate of fear, with the consequent long-term damage to millions, has been one of the most egregious acts by this government (and the competition for egregious acts is stif)
How is this different from OCD? That can have a wide variety of manifestations, and this appears to be one of them – not sure why it justifies a separate categorisation.
Presumably it’s just the usual Covid-exceptionalism where everything relating to it has to be made out to be new and unprecedented?
“Presumably it’s just the usual Covid-exceptionalism where everything relating to it has to be made out to be new and unprecedented?”
Exactly. Just like when, in March 2020, daily death tolls were being piped to everyone’s digital indoctrination devices in their pockets.
Everyone I knew (apart from my family) thought that was because the death rates were exceptional. Pointing out the fact they were quite normal earned me the title of “conspiracy theorist.”
No. This is justified as an identified syndrome of induced hypochondria with its own aetiology. That’s not your average OCD illness.
The psy-op is as much an infective agent as something physical.
This Gov will never be held to account for the damage they’ve caused with lockdowns. Nobody is even talking about it never mind questioning it.
I agree – the ‘calling-to-account fantasies’ are touching – but they are fantasies on current evidence.
I do NOT believe this crap, I have not heard one person talk like that, its been more of “ fuck why wait to the 19th we will drop it now ! “
Most people have realised they have been conned.
I wish you were right, but you clearly mix with more sensible people than I do. I know plenty of people who are worried, including the young and healthy.
My local pub is the same, Mike. I was in there Saturday evening. Not a mask in sight. Everyone behaving 100% normally, just as it was in the Before Covid Era. No stupid attempts to distance, no “COVID Dance”, everyone walking straight to the bar, paying cash, taking their own drinks away, sitting, standing, indoors, outdoors. TOTALLY NORMAL. And it was BUSY. Lovely!
Obviously there were QR codes stuck in many places, stickers on the floor saying “WAIT HERE, QUEUE HERE” etc., everywhere, but hey ho.
Oh, and from the little talk there was about all this sh*te, no one I spoke to is having the experimental gene therapy.
Wish I could find this pub you speak of.
You’re generalising from limited experience – as we all do to some extent.
However, over the last month, I’ve been in a number of places, from the south-west to northern Scotland. and sampled a cross-section of those mixing-points : motorway services and that great leveller – the public bog.
I have to say, mask-wearing was almost universal in these venues, in shops and restaurants/pubs, and in stop-overs. How deeply embedded, I don’t know. We’ll just have to see, but I was very much in a very small (vanishing) minority.
The Scots are more bullied and brainwashed than the Brits.
Same as a pub we frequent ,strange it has to be pointed out just how ‘normal’ this is…
What about therapy for those poor sods (us) who daily have to face the awful truth thqt the world has gone mad, global governments are mostly wicked, and we are likely to remain persecuted outcasts for decades?
Julian, I recommend you frequent or move to a “deprived” area and meet people who have been on the wrong side of authority all their lives. It’s very refreshing. For them this is nothing new – Business as Usual, in fact. People with “CAS” exist in my area, but they are few and far between. Masks in shops is still a thing, but yesterday and Saturday I saw a LOT more people not wearing them – possibly over one quarter.
Spot on. Sadly not long before covid I moved in precisely the other direction – and in many ways the move has been good, but from a covid point of view I would 100% agree – when I drive through shabby parts of North London on the way home from trips to the city, I see shops, cafes and restaurants with unmasked people behaving normally.
I hope you didn’t take out a big mortgage to support your move, Julian. Rates are low… currently.
Thanks for your concern, but we’re OK on that front, just surrounded by ultra-compliant people – in other ways a good thing (e.g. low crime, don’t meet too many edgy people – until they get drunk on Friday and Saturday night) but terrible if you’re in the middle of a scamdemic.
Glad to hear it, Julian. Stay sane.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The government has bullied, frightened and coerced us all. We have all been affected in some way: it has certainly damaged my mental health. It was entirely foreseeable that for a proportion of the population the damage would manifest itself as a sort of Stockholm Syndrome.
Interesting poll in btl comments
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/reader-comments/p/comment/link/719002907
40% of people avoided touching things outside before Covid-19. Its called hygiene. Using public conveniences when we knew most people didn’t wash their hands was another reason people used a clean tissue to simply open doors to leave…what’s new?
Even cash point machines were filthy, now they are clean…about time too.
Howard! I thought you’d gone?
This is a “nudge” poll/report to try and get the those who aren’t anxious to modify their behaviour and pander to the fears of the anxious by voluntarily continuing to wear masks etc. And just to encourage is we have a new threat from Whitty that if we don’t “behave responsibly” a new lockdown may be required later in the year.
My personal belief is that those who aren’t Covid fearties need to demonstrate to the anxious that there is nothing to be scared of by behaving as close to old normal as possible. Which is what I’ve been doing all along.
Exactly. It’s been hard, all I have had from my colleagues and the strangers I see in the shops are evil glares, a handful of very nasty remarks and threats of violence, and accusations of being a science denier, conspiracy theorist, QAnon member, mentally instable, cold-hearted, callous etc.
Stay strong, RTSC.
To some people it is now a religion, and any questioning of “The Science” and its rituals, no matter how mild and reasonably-expressed, will cause them to take umbrage. Standard accusations are that anyone not fully bought-in is a “Covid-denier”, a “conspiracy theorist”, is “happy to let people die”, is a “science denier” (very ironic, that one!), and so on.It all goes to show how easily many people are influenced by propaganda.
It would appear supporting your country’s Football team or enjoying others’ company in a hospitality setting override this anxiety.
It’s quite remarkable how many people seem to suffer from this anxiety at the thought of having to go back into an office (even part-time), but magically don’t suffer from it when it comes to their social lives…
Got it in one, CynicalRealist!
“If you want a picture of the present, imagine Susan Michie’s boot stamping on your face – forever.”
If anyone wants to check how psychological abuse can result in irrational fear and an acceptance into your incarceration and subservience to a fascist dictatorship, here’s one you can write to:
Room 347 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology University College London 1-19 Torrington Place London, WC1E 7HB
+44 (0)20 7679 5930
s.michie@ucl.ac.uk
Some of us have been living in fear and anxiety for the last year and can’t wait to be able to sleep soundly again.
Nearly half, 46%, of those who have been vaccinated, say they are still concerned they will catch the virus.
Not surprising. That’s what they have repeatedly been told, as they clamp on their face knickers. For once, they have probably been told the truth. What they haven’t been told is hoe astronomically unlikely it is that the virus will do them any harm.
So important for halfwitted sheeples to get support.
Not like people in such pain that they yanked their own teeth out because the dentist was too cowardly to help them, then. Not like cancer patients during the first savage lockdown, then. Or old people in care home hell. Or people dying in solitude without the ‘support’ of their loved ones.
Diddums.
Let’s get some focus here! Essentially, the anxiety is not due to release of lockdown. It is due to scaremongering about covid. Whether there is lockdown or not, this anxiety will remain until its causes are removed. Pandering to the causes is no way to remove this anxiety.
God save us from these hysterical hypochondriacs. GET A GRIP.
Diddums.