Coronavirus: The pandemic's impact on emotional health - opinion

• Author: MORDECHAI KATZ
• Published date: 30 March 2021
• Date: 30 March 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

What exactly was the virus's impact on emotional health? There have been numerous articles and reports highlighting data that discuss the emotional health experience of many people throughout the crisis. However, while their circumstances were exacerbated by the coronavirus, there is more to the picture.

For example, an article in the Times of Israel during the first lockdown in Israel was titled, "Virus lockdowns may be hiding an outbreak of violence against women, children." The author's essential point was that in a nationally mandated lockdown, those experiencing domestic violence were trapped with the people who hurt them regularly. That is a scary piece of information. Factoring in WIZO's research that showed a 300% increase in domestic violence complaints during the pandemic points to COVID-19 being responsible for a lot of additional pain in the form of physical and emotional abuse.

But what was the situation for these individuals before the pandemic? The above-mentioned article points out that, prior to COVID-19, the situation was only better because there were more places for the victims of abuse to hide. The real change caused by the virus was that those who were already in unsafe relationships had nowhere to go other than their homes, which were unsafe. With that in mind, the increase in domestic violence complaints means something very different. The abused were in danger before there was a single lockdown; COVID simply intensified something that already existed.

On a similar note, Kav L'Noar's newest psychotherapy clinic, which opened in the midst of the pandemic, is now serving hundreds of individuals. While the pandemic raised the urgency for emotional healthcare – one of several impetuses necessitating the clinic's opening – the issues clients had were unrelated to the pandemic itself. Not a single client at the clinic came in for something directly related to the coronavirus. They struggled with their emotional health before the pandemic, too. They just had nowhere to go. The kupot-funded clinic is not a solution to something created by the coronavirus, it's a solution for emotional health issues that predate the virus.

Both of these scenarios indicate that emotional health issues existed before the coronavirus and were simply unaddressed. But why?

IN A RECENT conversation, Dr. Zev Ganz, clinical director of Kav L'Noar's Beit Shemesh clinic, shared a striking dichotomy. Anyone in any city in Israel can go to their local kupot cholim...