COVID-19 and the Failures of Psychology

I trust for many of you these phrases are just as triggering to you as they are to me. Let’s go back to March 2020 for a little bit. It almost seems like ancient history at this point. But all of the above phrases were uttered consistently during this time. We were to “trust the science” (meaning whatever the CDC and Fauci told us to do) and to wear masks/socially distance because it’s surely worth the hassle “if it saves just one life.” After all, “we are all in this together.”  

At this stage in February 2023, we know how meaningless these words were. However, almost everyone in March of 2020 had at least some level of fear. Many were willing to put their life on hold for the “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” There was a recent article in the Atlantic titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”  This article is really to let everyone off the hook for the moral failures of our COVID policies. However, for the sake of argument, I’m going to present my own amnesty for the Mental Health field for the 15 Days to Slow the Spread. It was a weird and confusing time. But after those 15 days, I offer no such grace.

Let’s go back to “THE Science.” I bolded and capitalized “the” as this phrase is so insulting. Science is not a monolith. There are many fields within science. The field I am in is psychology.  I am a Licensed Professional Counselor. You would think psychology would have a pretty high seat at the table when proposing to completely change a culture's way of life. Again, for 15 days the effect was probably fairly minimal. However, there are still COVID policies in place nearly 3 years later! There is absolutely no excuse for heads in the psychology field to not sound the alarm on the long-term consequences of these policies.

Lockdowns were the first major ethical issue we faced. It doesn’t take being an expert in psychology to realize this was going to cause issues. We are social creatures by nature and we knew forcing social isolation on the population would cause excess mental health issues. I take issue with well-meaning conservatives who say “lockdowns don’t work.” I know what they are intending to say, but the reality is that lockdowns do work to slow the spread of illness. It just depends on how strict the lockdowns are. Human psychology has to have a seat at the table to not allow atrocities such as Nazi experiments to happen. 

I’m unsure of the numbers on this or if any stat even exists, but there had to have been a major increase in failure-to-thrive deaths in the elderly during COVID. Watching videos of upset elderly parents being unable to physically touch their loved ones is awful. We presented talking to each other through a window as being sufficient for human contact. If we truly respected “the science” we would know that physical touch is necessary to thrive. Psychological studies have known this for decades but we heard crickets when policies like this were presented. 

While the elderly were the most impacted by the disease and the policies surrounding it, I would argue what we have done to children is a worse moral failure. To be even more generous I will extend our amnesty for children from the 15 Days to Slow the Spread all the way through the Spring 2020 semester. I’ll allow amnesty for distance learning throughout the end of the year.  

What has happened since then is absolutely inexcusable. By the fall semester of 2020, we already had solid data that this virus did not affect children at a high rate at all. It is our role as adults in society to protect children and to help nurture them on their way to being productive citizens. The upside of forcing children to play alone, or wear masks all day was extremely minimal due to the risk of COVID being extremely minimal. We don’t even know the long-term effects we have put on the COVID generation of school-aged children. I fear depression and anxiety will be with this generation at a much higher rate.  

Until we learn there is no such thing as “THE Science” we are going to continue to see horrible policies like we have seen during COVID. As restrictions continue to wind down do not be lulled into thinking this will never happen again. There absolutely will be another pandemic down the line. We must let a diverse amount of fields and thoughts into policy decisions. After all, diversity is our strength, right?