A study suggests that the mental health crisis due to the pandemic was minimal. The BBC published this headline a few days ago, which echoed a report by several Canadian universities carried out in 137 countries. Since the article was published, Twitter has done what it does best, laugh at it and slaughter it.
To counter it, users respond with photos of the most absurd things they did during the worst weeks of the pandemic. “I celebrated the birthday of the dishwasher”, says one user. And in the image you can see her, indeed, holding a colorful cake in front of the appliance. A couple shows photos of the cricket they tamed; a girl, images of how she painted pupils on her eyelids so that she could take a Zoom class without it being noticed that she was sleeping; one dressed up as a custard, people learned to play very rare things with the flute, weddings were officiated between shampoo jars dressed as grooms, someone crocheted a roll of toilet paper.
Actually, as another answer points out, almost all of these are not symptoms of a mental health crisis, but rather “beautiful things we should keep if we manage to end capitalism”, nonsense denoting that if there were a time beyond work, we would have imagination to spend it on the most poetically useless activities. It’s all part of the folklore, sometimes a little cheesy, that we’ve invented to pretend that what happened in 2020 was not only tragic, but also a little idiotic at times.
The authors of the study admit that they did not look specifically at countries with lower per capita income nor did they focus on “children, young people or those who already had pre-existing problems”. Whatever the provocative BBC headline says, which was probably already written to get this kind of engagement, mental health professionals know we’ve come out of it, that the state has never been more worrying soul of teenagers, who planted seeds of traumas the depth of which we do not fully know, and which all started that day, three years ago, when we woke up at home with nowhere to go.
