THE AGE OF FEAR
Dr Harish Shetty, a renowned psychiatrist in Mumbai, is all too familiar with the mental fallout of a disaster. In his 33-yearlong career, he has helped survivors of the 1993 Latur earthquake in Maharashtra, the 1998 Kandla cyclone in Gujarat and the 2002 Gujarat riots process their individual and collective grief: the loss of home, the loss of loved ones, the loss of life as you knew it. Covid-19, however, is an “invisible enemy”. “The fear of a visible enemy can be delineated, imagined, circumscribed in the mind,” he explains. “Here, because of the invisibility of the perpetrator, the fear is multiplied a millionfold. There, the impact of the disaster was at one go; here, it is endless.” Shetty, in fact, has coined a new term to sum up our collective state of mind: ‘fearodemic’.
Anxiety has hit a peak in a nation where, as per a 2019 report published by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), some 197.3 million people live with mental disorders. It has only been exacerbated by Covid’s deadlier second wave, which has claimed 114,860 lives in just a month between April 25 and May 25, compared with the seven months it took to reach 114,682 deaths in the previous wave.
First, there is the fear of the disease itself. All through April, the only thing 27-year-old Vaibhav (name changed) could hear was the continuous wail of ambulance sirens in Delhi. Without realising it, he even began keeping count of how many he would hear in a day. Then, one day, he started feeling breathless himself. His chest felt tight, his pulse started racing, his blood pressure shot up. Vaibhav was convinced he had Covid. Next, he started worrying about his father, a heart patient. Would he pass on the infection to him? If his father took a turn for the worse, would he find a hospital bed, oxygen or medicines for him? Would he die? Before he knew it, Vaibhav was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack.
Covid-19 remains an unpredictable disease, even 14 months after it was first declared a pandemic. That has created an atmosphere of uncertainty, which, says consultant psychiatrist Dr Soumitra Pathare, director of
