while the idea of gathering anywhere for fun seems hard to imagine and maybe a little uncomfortable — especially after more than a year of social distancing and lockdowns — johal says that the key to figuring out what your post-pandemic life will look like is to decide what matters most — as individuals and as a society.
how has the pandemic affected our mental health?
the challenge of this really has been the ongoing uncertainty for a long period of time with not really a very good idea as to what the end point is going to be. i think that’s been the thing that has felt most destabilizing for people. they find themselves in a vulnerable position and perhaps in a situation where they don’t feel like they’ve got a lot of power or agency in terms of being able to influence their own outcome. they’re dependent on a lot of things going right around them.
what are the long term implications of living through this uncertainty?
partly, it’s that people are being asked to change their behaviour for a long period of time and then, suddenly, we get perhaps a light at the end of the tunnel and then we find that, actually, things perhaps aren’t going to work out so simply. there’s this constant dance of having hope and then having to readapt and say, ‘well, perhaps not in the way we thought.’ the other really big challenge to people’s mental health is that, after a certain point, it’s the secondary impacts that really start to place a load upon people. so much of the economy is tied up with the hospitality sector, the entertainment sector, the tourism sector. all that stuff that represents normal life has kind of disappeared, so it’s difficult to get all the structure and the routines and the pleasure that we would normally have had and trying to find things to replace that has been a real challenge for people.
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