One of the most distressing collateral damages is the mental health epidemic among children. Children as young as eight ‘are self-harming amid an unprecedented mental health crisis fuelled by the stress of lockdown’,6 said accident and emergency consultant, Dr Dave Greenhorn. It is estimated that 1.5 million children and 8.5 million adults will need support for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorders and other mental health difficulties in the coming months and years, according to the Centre for Mental Health.7 As their chief economist said, ‘the numbers are stark’.
It is the personal stories which illuminate the crisis. Quantitative analysis for the policies is overdue, but the analysis must also be qualitative – we need to hear people’s stories. This is why I interviewed a range of people whose lives were affected by the policies of fear.
I followed up with a few of these interviewees, to see how they were feeling. I was pleased to hear that Susan, 15, felt much better and stopped self-harming once she was back at school. Jane had started taking anti-depressants and felt better once she was back at work. Unfortunately her husband had been diagnosed – very late due to healthcare delays – with a rare and difficult type of cancer. Mark was trying to challenge his agoraphobia by going shopping occasionally and this time felt the benefit of the return to the office. Jimmy, who tried to kill himself, is now, thankfully, coping with the support of his family. Sadly, Dave, the doctor, told me that the woman with children who suffered irreversible brain damage following a suicide attempt died soon after we had spoken.
An onslaught of scare-mongering is known to be a health risk. The report COVID-19 and the 24/7 News Cycle: Does COVID-19 News Exposure Affect Mental Health? found, unsurprisingly, that ‘the 24/7 news cycle covering the virus may amplify perceived threats and have harmful effects on mental health’.8 And in the US, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) suggests that after a disaster people take care of their emotional health by taking ‘breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories. It can be upsetting to hear about the crisis and see images repeatedly. Try to do enjoyable activities and return to normal life as much as possible and check for updates between breaks.’9
The links between fear and anxiety and health cannot always be proven to be causal, but there is obvious cause for concern and potential for fear messaging to reduce health and happiness. It serves us to remember the basic Hippocratic principle: ‘First, do no harm.’
4. LEADERS BUILD FALSE MORAL AUTHORITY AND PROFIT
Sometimes, those who rule do not have our best interests at heart. A little scepticism is healthy, even necessary. Of course, we won’t solve this conundrum by saying we don’t trust politicians and by retreating from political life. The opposite: we need to ask questions, even when we are being encouraged to fall into line.
Norman Baker, former Liberal Democrat MP, wrote an article10 for the Daily Mail about the day that anthrax was deliberately released in a tunnel on the Northern Line by scientists from the UK government’s Porton Down laboratory. As he explained, it was far from the only time they’ve used Britons as guinea pigs for experiments. These are the kinds of incidents in British history which would startle and horrify most people, who assume unethical experimentation is the preserve of the Nazis.
We had a conversation about the Covid crisis. He emphasised that ‘even in a democracy we should never assume the government of the day is right or even well-intentioned. That’s not how a democracy works. Even now, at a time of a public health crisis, it is our duty to question. That doesn’t mean to assume the government is lying. We know enough to ask whether governments are acting in your best interests or theirs. People have a very low opinion of politicians, and recent reasons have included the Iraq war and the expenses scandal. But, for some reason, they believe the government unwaveringly about an issue of their security, such as an epidemic.’
So, did he think the public ought not to believe the government about the epidemic? ‘They’ve made all sorts of errors,’ he said, ‘but, worse, we know they have behaved in ways which are inappropriate, such as giving contracts out to their mates and to Tory donors. There’s no doubt in my mind we’ve wasted money on mates to the government.’
As I said in Chapter 14, ‘Cults, conspiracy and psychic epidemics’, we must be aware that ‘disaster capitalism’ – a complex series of networks and influence employed by private companies and governments that allows them to profit from disasters – happens during shock and fear. Governments create fear, then cultivate and exploit it. We won’t understand the convergent agendas, the lean to authoritarianism, or how chaos translated to cash until later, and certainly not until we can assess rationally. To think rationally we need to be less frightened. I put this to Baker and he concurred, saying that he believed people had suspended their ‘analytic powers because they are worried about dying’ and felt ‘powerless’. It is at this point more than ever he believes people need to ask the difficult questions.
5. THE USE OF FEAR IS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC
‘The use of fear is anti-democratic,’ sociologist Dr Ashley Frawley told me. ‘There is a lack of belief in the human subject, a subject that is seen as animalistic, incapable of understanding risk, and weak. The behavioural psychologists saw people’s proportionate responses to risk as a problem that needed to be overcome. The use of fear assumes you could never deal with this epidemic by using democratic means. And then
