COVID Has Some People Depressed

Last week I read about the great number of people who were stricken with depression due to the lock-downs, and isolation, and social distancing that were associated with the COVID pandemic. Oh! Poor babies! Were you so lonely, with recourse only to social media, video calls, and Zoom meetings? They found the isolation depressing, even though the odds are that they were not actually alone for much of that time.

Applying my maximum degree of sympathy to those people, forced into a corner, as it were, I will admit that they may have experienced some degree of depression-like symptoms. Got to drinking more than usual, perhaps? Sleep pattern slightly disturbed, was it? Well, boo-fucking-who.

Speaking as one who is actually depressed, along with several other maladies, with an ACE score of five, I can tell you that I loved the lock-down portion of the pandemic. I hate and fear going outside, or anywhere, or seeing anyone but the very few people whose company I actually enjoy. All I want to do is sit and read, and write, and in the evenings watch some Netflix. And talk to my wife; I enjoy her company. I like being indoors, at home.

There is an important point to be made here. There is a huge qualitative difference between situational depression and major depression (sometimes called clinical depression).

Situational depression is like being sad for six months when your dog dies. Or maybe a year if it was the death of a beloved parent. Friend, dogs die, that's life, and if you had even one beloved parent, quit your complaining. You were way ahead of the game. You've been getting over it since the first moment that you knew that you had it.

Clinical depression is a life sentence. Every morning over coffee; every day at work or with your family; every evening as you try to calm down enough to get some sleep; every day in every decade of your life. It's the filter through which your entire life experience passes. It's HORRIBLE.

So if this COVID thing has you a little down, look for the good. You're going to get over it. Unless it's immediately followed by, or joined by, monkey-pox, or COVID-22, or some new MERS variant, or the Black Plague. All of that lock-down time has left many major cities overrun with rats. New York, and my own city, among them. That never bodes well. It's never going to end. Then the Gulf Stream will change direction or something else climate related. Crops are already failing; droughts and floods are already becoming unmanageable. It's early in the game to get depressed by the new normal of the Twenty-First Century. Give it another few years to get some wind in its sails. You're depressed now? The real fun hasn't even started yet.