The age of anxiety

The argument

Many people with anxiety or other underlying mental health issues might experience a worsening of their conditions due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Even those without underlying mental health issues can experience anxiety and psychological effects due to the virus and quarantine, which is the part proponents of this position take to be revealing: the pressures involved are severe enough to produce symptoms in people who had none before. The first of those pressures is the character of the threat itself. The uncontrollable nature of the pandemic can cause feelings of helplessness and loss of control of one's life, in addition to the fear of being infected. A danger that cannot be reduced much by anything an individual does gives worry nothing to resolve into, so it persists rather than being discharged through action. The second is that the usual remedies were withdrawn at the same moment. Isolation from loved ones and society due to social distancing aggravates this, because many don't have contact with the people or activities they normally rely on to deal with stress and anxiety. The coping resources people would ordinarily draw on were removed by the very event that created the need for them. The third is the informational environment. The general feeling of high alert and intense emotions and events in the media and the world due to the pandemic can increase or create anxiety and other mental health issues in many people, since attention is held continuously on the threat with no interval in which it recedes. The uncertainty of how the coronavirus will affect the world's future, combined with the isolation and distancing from loved ones, can cause anxiety in anyone, even without past mental health history.

Context

The world is now awash with frightening headlines. And as lockdown takes hold, there is no longer an option to disconnect from that news.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The fact that more people are reporting mental health issues does not directly mean that coronavirus is causing or worsening these problems. Since the pandemic is an easy cause to attribute these issues to, people might start to report symptoms they were already experiencing now that there is a logical explanation for them. Many might also report previous conditions as due to the virus because they assume it must have an impact, even if it actually doesn't. Due to the high presence of media covering COVID-19's effects on mental health, people could report mental health issues because it is a popular thing to do, not because the pandemic is actually causing them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Fear and a sense of helplessness during an emergency are widely reported responses to disruption of any kind. The argument does not distinguish a proportionate reaction to a serious event from a deterioration in mental health. [Rejecting P2] Isolation is described as removing familiar coping routines, but the argument does not weigh what replaced them, nor establish that the loss was severe or sustained enough to constitute damage. [Rejecting P3] The premise treats reported problems as a measure of underlying prevalence. As the counter-argument notes, saturation coverage supplies a ready explanation for symptoms people may already have had, so reporting and incidence cannot be assumed to move together.