PPSD

Post Pandemic Stress Disorder

Sometimes the mainstream news prints important stories by accident, because they don’t think through the full implications of the story they are reporting on - like this article from last week in the Guardian.

The Guardian piece looks at new research from the University of Bangor indicating that those ‘unselfish’ people who most strenuously complied with the COVID lockdowns were still suffering in early 2023 from some combination of high stress, anxiety and depression - as well as continuing to self-isolate. In contrast, those ‘selfish’ people who questioned need for lockdowns and cheated on compliance, had quickly bounced back to something approaching normality. (Oh, the unfairness of it all!)

The Guardian article did allow that: “Trauma of pandemic having lasting impact on people’s mental health three years on, research reveals.” Talk about burying the lede! For me the obvious story here is that the pandemic never ended for a significant chunk of the British population. The study tells us that the group that was most compliant with the lockdown protocols is now from suffering serious and ongoing mental health problems. How big a group are we talking about here? Is it ten percent of the British population that is still seriously messed up? 20%? A quarter? I’d love to know.

This research project was small enough it should be considered a signal that more research is needed rather than as a substantive finding. The results were based on detailed surveys of only 850 people. Without knowing how those people were selected, its even difficult to know whether that small sample is representative of the UK population as a whole.

With those caveats, it certainly appears that a significant minority of the British population is suffering from a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - which I suppose we might more properly label as PPSD: Post Pandemic Stress Disorder.

We know from the leaked emails of former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, that the British Government made a concerted effort to “scare the pants off people” as a way to encourage compliance with draconian COVID lock-downs. It appears they succeeded all too well.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the powers that be in Canada and the United States were operating from the same playbook - deliberately trying to terrify the populace into compliance. When I look around me - both at the people I see, and the people I never see - my Spidey senses tell me that the pandemic never ended for a lot of people here in North America too.

In a past life, I used to teach stress management workshops. This is how I would explain PTSD back in the day:

Humans have two interlinked sets of stress responses. The first we can call the Emergency Response System. Based primarily on the master hormone adrenaline, it establishes levels of readiness to face immediate short-term threats of all kinds. We could call the levels of readiness All Clear, One-alarm Fire, Two-alarm fire, and Three-alarm Fire. Every system and organ in the body has its own automatic drill it goes into in response to rising adrenaline levels.

The second stress response could be called the Siege Response System. It’s based primarily on the master hormone cortisol, and helps the body remain in a state of heightened readiness during more extended emergencies - a flood, a drought, or a large predator shadowing your tribe for days at a time. (If that last example seems a little out of place, it shouldn’t. Evolution changes a long-lived species like humans at a glacially slow place. You may be living in cyberspace, but your body is optimally-designed for life in the Stone Age.)

When the Siege Response System is triggered, the level of Emergency Preparedness in the body never goes below a One-alarm Fire. What’s more, your adrenalin-mediated Emergency Response System is put on a hair-trigger - ready to send you to a Three-Alarm Fire level of alertness at a moment’s notice.

Normally, once whatever crisis has triggered the Siege Response System has passed, cortisol levels gradually decrease until the body is back at a relaxed All-Clear state.

However, if the Siege Response System is engaged for too long - or at too high an intensity - the body seems to lose the ability to turn the Siege Response System off. The body also ends up hard-wired to respond to various stress triggers. The classic example would be the Vietnam vet who still falls into an immediate combat crouch every time a car backfires anywhere within earshot, decades after returning from Vietnam.

Why is it important that we do more research to find out how many people have PPSD?

First of all, because post traumatic disorders rarely get better on their own.

In a post from a year ago, I talked about how, during the pandemic, most people suffered some diminishment in their friendship circle, their social life, their play life, and perhaps even a reduction in those activities where they felt competent and useful in the world. I suggested that it was possible to recover from all those losses by taking active steps to replace whatever had been lost.

Which you can do if your mental state has returned more or less to normal. If you were traumatized during the pandemic, that will not be the case. You are hard-wired into a permanent emergency state. For you, the pandemic will never end. Just leaving the house is likely to trigger you. If you respond to the anxiety you feel upon leaving the house by putting on a mask, the mask itself will trigger you into an even higher level of distress.

If a significant chunk of the population has PPSD, the only way those people will ever fully recover is through one or other form of desensitization therapy. If our governments have seriously damaged a significant chunk of the population, they need to recognize that, and take steps to clean up the mess they have made.

I also suspect PPSP is implicated in a wide range of health issues. (Which I have put in italics below.)

Cortisol has important impacts on the body’s metabolism. Cortisol makes your body burn calories at a much higher rate of efficiency - which enables the body to better survive when food is scarce. And which, unfortunately, makes it extremely easy to put on weight when food is abundant. (Increases in obesity during the pandemic)

The body’s cortisol-induced metabolic efficiency has one important health drawback - it leaves the body more vulnerable to heart attacks, particularly sudden heart attacks. (Increased sudden deaths due to heart attacks)

When the body first goes into the Siege Response, the immune system ramps up into high gear, making the body more able to fight off infection or disease. Over time, the immune system becomes exhausted. The body’s ability to fight off infections eventually collapses. (Epidemics of RSV, flu, etc.)

In the Siege Response, all the body’s resources go into heightened readiness. Maintenance activities are put on hold. Most crucially the body’s normal efforts to destroy isolated cancer cells can be interrupted, allowing cancer cells to multiply unchecked. (Increased incidence of fast-growing cancers)

The heightened readiness of the Siege Response drains the body’s resources. If it goes on long enough, the body eventually collapses into exhaustion. (Increased rates of long-term disability)

In Siege Response, at least some women will see a reduction in fertility; in the Stone Age, it made good evolutionary sense for women to delay getting pregnant until a crisis situation had passed. (Fertility issues)

I am not saying that PPSD explains 100% of any of the above italicized trends. I’m perfectly willing to believe that vaccine side-effects and/or 5G radiation may be responsible for part or even most of the health issues we are seeing. That said, I would be very surprised if PPSD was not a significant contributing factor to all of the above problems. I also suspect that PPSD is at least partially responsible for the shockingly high number of excess deaths we’ve seen over the past three years.

There’s one final reason why it’s important to realize that the pandemic never ended for many people: Stress is contagious. Back in the Stone Age, if you were tuned in to the stress levels of those around you, and automatically raised your level of alertness/vigilance to mirror theirs, doing so often kept you alive.

I don’t think we’re all the same in this regard, but I do think almost everyone responds unconsciously to some degree when someone near them is stressed out. For myself, whenever I find myself feeling inexplicably anxious, I’ll take a quick look around. As often as not, there will be someone in a mask in my peripheral vision, spraying antiseptic at whatever they plan to touch next. As soon as I realize the source of my disquiet, my stress levels return to normal.