Covid-19 process psychology!

Neşe Berber – GJC Member of Nationwide Media Assembly

2020 has gone down in history as a year we will be talking about for years to come. By 2020, the whole world has started to deal with a whole new problem, a major health disaster such as the global epidemic, putting aside the economy and politics. The Coronavirus outbreak, which began in Wuhan, China, has affected the entire world. The process of fighting this epidemic has had multidimensional effects. We have experienced a process that has consequences in all areas, from health to education, from economics to psychology, and we continue to live.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, Turkey has managed the process in the field of health with great success. March-June coronavirus disease seems to be far away to us, now almost every 10 people we know began to see. Everyone has a great fear because of the virus.

I wonder if I’ll get the virus and die? That’s everyone’s concern. I also recently contracted the corona virus while trying to protect myself. What I went through during the illness was really not easy. First of all, everyone was saying something different. My head was full of curiosity about what would happen to me with this virus that I first met. After two days spent with hoarseness body pains, I had a Test at the Turkish Grand National Hospital and two hours laterI found out I was positive with a phone call from chief physician Dr. Hussein Arslan.

A very fast filiation team appeared at the door. They brought the drugs and told me how to use them. The next morning, when I began to have severe headaches, nausea and vomiting, my hospital process began. We’re dealing with a virus that’s different for everyone. After 14 days of quarantine, the disease is over.

But my doctors say that the earliest recovery time for this virus is 1 month, and to say that I have fully recovered, it takes a process such as 6 months. I wrote about the whole process in my column in Yeni Birlik Newspaper.

I want to talk about some of the emotions that develop in people who contracted the virus after the pandemic started. Guilt, anger, fear ‘if I infect my relatives’, helplessness, loneliness, feeling ‘if they know I’m sick’, deep unhappiness, despair, insecurity, and the biggest and most serious ‘Will I die?’ of fear. It was the questions of what to do against the feelings of anxiety, fear, fear of death that were most conveyed to me in the process. I asked Health Minister Dr. Fahrettin Koca and Prof. Dr. Kemal Memişoğlu. Because that’s what people wanted to hear the most.

After I was diagnosed with Covid-19, I started thinking. I kept my mind busy for days, wondering where I went, who I met, who I was infected with. But it’s impossible to find. People diagnosed with Covid-19 are trying to clarify in their minds the uncertainty about where they got the virus by increasing self-questioning during this period. Those who tested positive for Covid; I wonder if I didn’t pay enough attention? What am I missing or wrong? they question themselves.

Along with the possibility of infecting people in their immediate vicinity, their negative feelings towards them and their self-judgment also increase. Patients who tested positive for Covid can express anger by blaming others during this period. People with positive diagnoses have a fear that they will infect their relatives, parents and children, especially.  Emotional problems begin with the disease people feel helpless because we are faced with an unknown virus and there is nothing we can do about it.

People who are isolated at home or in the hospital during the quarantine period may experience a more severe sense of loneliness when they are unable to continue their social life due to health and are forced to meet their needs, especially if they are completely alone.

People who have not had the disease are more cautious because of their fear of approaching positive cases, and sometimes limit their social relationships, as well as people who may feel unwanted.

Along with all this, people miss their pre-covid-19 lives, and are exposed to many different negative emotions during the quarantine process, which makes them feel more unhappy.

Since the start of the Covid-19 process, the feeling that people think and are most uncomfortable with is that whether they are diagnosed positively with Covid-19 or not, they feel much more intense fear of death, parallel to the anxiety they have previously heard about the disease.

I’m not an expert, but if you think and ask how I’m coping, I’d like to answer in a short, clear understandable way with the idea that maybe it will help you. First, I fully trusted our health army and put myself in their safe hands. I took the pills they gave me. It felt so good to watch nature. I did a breathing exercise, and it worked. Most importantly, I have not given up on positive thinking. If you have to meet Covid-19, so do you. I wish everyone a healthy year.