Panic room

A woman looks through a window Illustrated Service (Automatic) / Europa Press

• The silent pandemic: workers' mental health deteriorating rapidly

About two months ago a friend contracted coronavirus.

The first few days he had mild symptoms: a not very high fever and a slight cough.

It did not appear that his case was going to be more serious.

But one morning, after almost two weeks in confinement with his family, he suddenly woke up with symptoms of suffocation.

His partner, terrified, called the ambulance and in less than an hour - despite residing in a town somewhat far from the hospitals, blessed public health - he was in the emergency room.

After a good round of tests, they explained to him that his symptoms had nothing to do with the epidemic.

Fortunately her lungs had not been affected, the feeling of suffocation was the manifestation of a serious anxiety attack.

To her incredulity, the doctors explained to her that they faced similar clinical conditions with people with covid-19 on a daily basis.

The truth is that my friend has overcome the infection, but still has not gotten rid of anxiety.

His case, as indicated by the doctors, is common.

According to a study published by

The Lancet Psychiatry

, 18% of patients in the United States who contracted the coronavirus later suffered some type of mental illness.

But it is not only the infected who suffer from these diseases.

Last January

the results of an international study

came to light in

Psychiatry Research

on the increase in mental illness during the pandemic.

Apparently, the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression were, respectively, five, four and three times more frequent compared to what the World Health Organization routinely reports.

In Spain, where, as we know, the number of psychologists per 100,000 inhabitants is a third of the European average, the figures are also worrying.

It is estimated that consultations for psychological disorders have increased during the crisis by 168% and that 15.8% have suffered panic attacks since the pandemic began.

Surely we are in the best equipped time to predict the future of all the previous ones, but that does not seem to reassure us, quite the opposite.

Perhaps and precisely because we believed that our lives were under control, it has been harder for the magic ball to break down.

Let's face it, not knowing what is going to happen kills us and we get worse and worse.

We are afraid and fear is a thorny business.

It settles in us without our even perceiving it and controls us to the point that we can end up convinced that our thoughts are perfectly rational.

The problem is that we do not know, the mental fog is so high that it prevents us from distinguishing if what we consider to be true may not be anything other than a reflection of our fears.

It is not that this is a new situation, human beings make us very nervous not knowing what is going to happen.

Historically, strategies have been sought to discover the future, especially in times of crisis.

Thus, for example, in ancient Rome the high political spheres resorted, when they were wrong, to the magistrates who exercised the art of divination by observing the birds and were closely controlled by a priest.

Incredible as it may seem in our scientific-technical society, we have also made use of this old resource.

Nicolás Ajaujula, the British psychic who claims to have predicted the coronavirus through past life regressions, has become famous.

Zulema Hormaeche is also in high demand, a fortune teller who has acquired great notoriety because, before the election of Joe Biden, and making use of her skills as a tarot reader, she took out a card from a building struck by lightning and prophesied a change of era.

Here we are not short either, it seems that the consultations to the fortune tellers have skyrocketed and there is no shortage of seers who claim to have predicted what was going to happen, such as Aramis Fuster, who supposedly predicted the hecatomb in 2009 and does not stop making predictions that overwhelm the headlines of the main media.

To find a bit of security we would do anything, it seems.

Some come to resort to the outdated resource of divination, but there are also those who put into practice another method as old as the previous one, and much cheaper, which is to deny the evidence.

Faced with the anguish that no one can, with proven certainty, assure what will happen, then it is better to deny everything: there is no pandemic, this is a minor disease, the hospitals have not been collapsed, it is all a great farce orchestrated by dark powers who want to control us.

Whatever it is before admitting that things are changing, probably hopelessly, that we do not know very well what will become of us and our loved ones, whatever it is before facing the uncertainty of the present, before ending in the emergency room, to accept that we need psychological assistance because what we have is a widespread and uncontrollable panic attack.

Pilar Fraile

is a writer. With his latest novel,

Days of Euphoria

(Alianza Editorial), he has won the Critics' Prize of Castilla y León.