Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

As the pandemic continues, Allina Health Aetna believes we need to find ways to safely coexist with Covid.

I'm Tom Lindquist and today I'm talking with Cara McNulty and Mary Beth Lardizabal.

We're seeing spiking stress and anxiety in a lot of people.

So Cara, can you talk to us about the causes for this and some thoughts around those?

We know that anxiety, stress, depression is continuing to be on the rise.

So what we're seeing is general anxiety is up 60 percent and then think about domestic violence is up 18 percent.

You have over 23 million Americans who are out of work.

We see alcohol sales up over 30 percent since March.

So all of that is culminating while we're seeing a decrease in people seeking care.

That's one of the most concerning things about what's happening right now.

We know that people are not going to the emergency room to seek care.

We know that our in-patient units have lower census.

We know that crisis teams are not being called to homes.

So what is happening to the folks that need the care?

They're not coming.

How do you suggest people talk to loved ones about Covid-19?

One thing I think is really important for people when they have this sense of anxiety, what can you control?

How do you talk to your kids about the virus?

How do you talk to them about the fact that they can't go to prom or they can't go to graduation.

In the acute phase we thought oh, we'll do this for a month and then we'll be fine and then we can go back to normal and we realized now this is an ongoing pandemic.

So we're just trying to make sure that we increase our access to mental health to everyone.

We are taking that same approach, looking at addressing across that continuum and making sure we're meeting people across their needs and in their time of need.

What we don't want to do is we don't want to act like it's no big deal and we want to kind of minimize what's happening.

So it's okay not to be okay.

Everyone else is having the same experience.

How have you seen Covid-19 changing the conversation around mental health?

One thing that we've learned from this pandemic is maybe we were too busy.

Maybe when we slow down, we actually have a quality of life that's different, that we enjoy and we didn't even realize what we were missing.

One of the things that we do a lot of focusing on with our own employees and with our providers is not only to talk about hope and resiliency but to show signs and to show positive things that are happening.

We see that mental health wellbeing is being talked about more than it probably ever has.

You can't open a newspaper, look at an article, have a conversation without it coming up.

So we're using that as a hopeful action that will continue that momentum.