KVVU: Nevada Resilience Project launches website to provide resources for coping with COVID-19. “The Nevada Resilience Project announced the launch of a new website Wednesday to help people manage the impacts of COVID-19. NRP was created to help build coping strategies for those experiencing stress or anxiety with COVID-19, the group said in a press release. The website… will list resources and information related to job loss, housing insecurity, isolation or healthcare challenges.”
mental health
New York Times: Don’t Grieve Alone. Reach Out.
New York Times: Don’t Grieve Alone. Reach Out.. “One of the cruelest realities of this pandemic is that it has deprived so many of us the opportunity to grieve in the most familiar, instinctive ways. We can share stories, cry and laugh together over Zoom, but we can’t simply sit in quiet companionship or hold each other when words fail us. After my loss, I ran out of words to share; I couldn’t imagine calling anyone. How was I going to feel connected to others, find comfort and strength in my friends?” Easier said.
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Dame: What Are We To Do With All This Grief?
Dame: What Are We To Do With All This Grief?. “I do not know how to talk about this grief. This American grief that I now carry in my heart, in my bones, in every cell and sinew of my being. This grief with which I wake up and go to sleep, this grief that has caught me, some nights, on the way back from the bathroom. It’s too big for me to frame, too vast for me to organize. It’s been overflowing the banks of each and every day since March 13, when the nation began to shut down and then looked up to see that we were dying.”
WSAV: How to turn off Facebook voter registration prompts
WSAV: How to turn off Facebook voter registration prompts. “Whether you’re already tired of election season, or you’ve already voted early, you may be sick of seeing the prompts on Facebook to register to vote. Here’s your hack to make them go away.”
As the Coronavirus Surges, a New Culprit Emerges: Pandemic Fatigue (New York Times)
New York Times: As the Coronavirus Surges, a New Culprit Emerges: Pandemic Fatigue. “With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.”
Elemental: What Doomscrolling Does to the Brain
Elemental: What Doomscrolling Does to the Brain. “We’re taking in more media than ever. And often, that means reading or watching gloomy story after gloomier story, or, as New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose called it back in March, ‘doomsurfing.’ Taken together, this is a dangerous formula. Consuming too much bad news on your phone or the TV can be harmful — studies find it’s bad for your physical and mental health — and the constant bombardment only raises the risk.”
Coronavirus: Health experts join global anti-lockdown movement (BBC)
BBC: Coronavirus: Health experts join global anti-lockdown movement. “Thousands of scientists and health experts have joined a global movement warning of “grave concerns” about Covid-19 lockdown policies. Nearly 6,000 experts, including dozens from the UK, say the approach is having a devastating impact on physical and mental health as well as society. They are calling for protection to be focused on the vulnerable, while healthy people get on with their lives.”
Irish Times: How to fight the psychological fatigue of Covid-19’s second wave
Irish Times: How to fight the psychological fatigue of Covid-19’s second wave. “We are facing into a challenging winter with no end in sight. It is easier to experience a sense of camaraderie queuing outside the supermarket in the summer than during a cold, dark wet winter’s evening. In addition, the normal social events that sustain us through winter feel under threat. These include sport, music and theatre, family rituals over Halloween and our collective celebrations of Christmas. It can feel like we have nothing to look forward to and there is widespread gloom and psychological fatigue. As we move forward, learning to manage our individual and collective mood will be crucial to determining how well we manage the ongoing coronavirus crisis.”
New York Times: Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too
New York Times: Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too. “I have a yearslong WhatsApp message group with a handful of fellow mothers of small children from across the United States and Canada. Since the pandemic began, what I refer to as ‘mom chats after dark’ start at around 7:30 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. That’s when the children are asleep, and a wave of inebriation begins on the shores of the Atlantic and crashes across the continent. The above message was from July, when we hit 125 days of lockdown.”
Tulane University: Google search data reveals major panic attack issue, Tulane study shows
Tulane University: Google search data reveals major panic attack issue, Tulane study shows. “The team used Google Trends to analyze an extensive list of mental health-related terms that people searched for before and after the World Health Organization issued a pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020. They found a major jump in searches related to anxiety, panic attacks and treatments for panic attacks, especially remote and self-care techniques, in the weeks following the pandemic declaration.”
Michigan Health: Feeling Stressed or Down in a World with COVID? Try This Writing Tool
Michigan Health: Feeling Stressed or Down in a World with COVID? Try This Writing Tool. “The University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center created a new expressive writing tool called Making Meaning that allows people to put their thoughts and feelings into words to help relieve stress and anxiety.”
Sydney Morning Herald: National suicide monitoring website provides ‘seismic shift’ in tackling tragedies
Sydney Morning Herald: National suicide monitoring website provides ‘seismic shift’ in tackling tragedies. “A national database compiling timely information from paramedics, hospitals, coroners, police and the community on suicides will be launched on Tuesday to demystify the subject in a bid to prevent more deaths. In what the National Mental Health Commission describes as a seismic shift in addressing the issue, Australia’s National Suicide and Self-Harm Monitoring System will be a real-time, centralised and publicly searchable database to help detect trends and guide interventions.”
KDKA: Mental Health Experts Warn About Dangers Of ‘Doomscrolling’
KDKA: Mental Health Experts Warn About Dangers Of ‘Doomscrolling’. “Experts say spending too much time on social media can be damaging to your mental health, especially when consuming too much negative news.”
University of Texas at Austin: Getting Fewer ‘Likes’ on Social Media Elicits Emotional Distress Among Adolescents
University of Texas at Austin: Getting Fewer ‘Likes’ on Social Media Elicits Emotional Distress Among Adolescents. “Study participants helped test drive a new program that allowed them to create a profile and interact with same-age peers by viewing and ‘liking’ one another’s profiles. Likes received were tallied, and a ranking of the various profiles displayed them in order of most to least liked. In actuality, likes were assigned by computer scripts. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either few likes or many likes relative to the other displayed profiles. In a post-task questionnaire, students in the fewer likes group reported more feelings of rejections and other negative emotions than those who received more likes.”
Fast Company: Researchers can’t even begin to assess the damage from viral suicide videos
Fast Company: Researchers can’t even begin to assess the damage from viral suicide videos. “For platforms with hundreds of millions of users, negatively impacting even a small percentage amounts to a large number of people. Without a clear understanding of the human impact of seeing a suicide online, platforms don’t have enough incentive to eliminate any possibility of this kind of content making its way onto our feeds.”