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Opinion | Coronavirus pandemic is unleashing a mental health crisis Hong Kong is unprepared for
- The impacts of the stress of economic uncertainty, risks to health and restrictions on daily life are likely to last long after the end of the pandemic
- Having already been caught ill-prepared by the current wave of Covid-19, Hong Kong cannot afford to ignore its ticking mental health time bomb
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The most insidious poisons are those that linger the longest. The surge in Covid-19 case numbers in Hong Kong in recent weeks has bludgeoned the city’s public health defences.
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Pundits have rightly turned their attention to how to curb the spread of Covid-19, but they seem to assume that everything will return to normal after it passes. This could not be further from the truth. We are faced with a deeper mental health crisis unleashed by the pandemic, the effects of which will be felt long after Covid-19 fades.
Having studied stress for years, I have observed that it is one of the most significant yet most underestimated plagues of modern society. Stress is a matter of life and death.
It is a precursor to mental disorders, like depression and suicide ideation, and diseases of despair, like alcoholism and substance abuse. Stress also indirectly increases the risk of major heart diseases and all-cause mortality, an effect that can begin as early as childhood.
Even more worrying, stressors have only grown in number and magnitude, and stress has continued to reach new highs in the time that I have studied it. With it, mental disorders have also grown.
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Epidemiological data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which is used by the World Health Organization, shows that the incidence rate of new patients with depressive disorders in China increased by roughly 10 per cent from 2003 to 2018.
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