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Javier Castro Bugarín
Buenos Aires, 28 Oct (EFE) .- The coronavirus pandemic has not only had devastating effects on the economy and health systems around the world: months of imprisonment, the strange “new normal” and uncertainty about the future have immersed in despair millions of people. In this very particular context, how do we take care of our mental health?
The First Virtual Symposium on Neuroscience and Wellbeing of the INECO Foundation, a meeting of the international scientific community that starts this Wednesday in Buenos Aires and whose main purpose is to provide the necessary tools to preserve our emotional well-being during and after the COVID-19.
This very particular context led the organizers to open the symposium to the public, thus adapting the conferences with the intention that they can be understood by those who do not belong to the scientific field.
“We have decided to make it open to international society, it will be in Spanish and English, for free. We already have more than 15,000 registered and it will be huge, because people are very interested in what wellness science has to say,” he tells Efe in videoconference Facundo Manes, neurologist and founder of the INECO Foundation.
“I hope the meeting has this dynamic, with great scientific rigor, that someone highly educated in neuroscience can learn and that society can also have tools to build better well-being right now,” added the expert, who shares a panel with professionals and researchers from Latin America, Spain and the United States.
WELLNESS AS EVERYDAY “CONSTRUCTION”
For centuries, human beings have tried to break down concepts such as intelligence, happiness or well-being, as frequent in our daily discourse as they are complex to analyze from a scientific and philosophical point of view.
According to Manes, science today “has made progress” in this field to certify that “a part of well-being can be built”, a task that requires the study not only of neuroscience, but of many other academic disciplines, such as economics and ‘economy. arts, which explains the interdisciplinary nature of the symposium.
A discussion forum that comes at a truly exceptional moment, since “never in history has there been a quarantine of these characteristics, so broad and engaging at the same time”, making it more difficult than ever to build sustainable well-being over time.
“It is a public health crisis, but also an economic and social crisis, it is a blow to the international order, a political, ideological and even moral crisis. All these crises have a great impact on our emotions and behavior, both at individual level “. like a community “, Manes reflects.
THE PANDEMIC TAKES OUR CAPABILITIES TO THE LIMIT
As for mental health, an indispensable element in the construction of the individual and collective well-being of a society, to what extent has it deteriorated following the pandemic?
For the founder of the INECO Foundation, the eruption of the coronavirus into our lives has left us “mentally exhausted”, with our “self-regulatory capabilities” at the limit.
“For months we have been doing things we didn’t do. Now I go out on the street, see a friend and stop to hug him. Doing things we usually didn’t do, like our habits, requires mental effort and mental and emotional resources are limited. “says Manes.
The pandemic has also deprived us of a horizon to cling to and has triggered uncertainty about the future, a state of mental fatigue that consumes “a lot of cognitive resources”.
“The lengthening of the pandemic, the lack of a horizon in many countries, the impossibility of predicting when it will end and also the economic complication increase cognitive and emotional exhaustion: symptoms such as anxiety, anguish, stress, exhaustion, insomnia, detachment appear , irritability … “, explains Manes.
A SUCCESS FOR MENTAL HEALTH
Data from the INECO Foundation support this reality: according to a study by this organization after the first 72 days of quarantine, symptoms related to depression and anxiety have increased among the Argentine population, certifying an emotional impact both of the coronavirus and of the mandatory isolation measures .
The most emotionally affected are young people between the ages of 15 and 24, women, due to the poor distribution of domestic tasks and sexist violence; the elderly, due to their loneliness, and health workers, who have been working hard for more than six months to contain the effects of the virus.
This circumstance is common all over the world, but becomes even more serious in the Latin American context, a region with profound inequalities and where the construction of well-being is even more complicated.
“In unequal countries like ours, although one does well personally, social inequality, poverty and high levels of corruption are problems that are known today, with scientific evidence, that affect one’s well-being. I believe this crisis must have a community response, that’s why a key word is resilience and another key word is empathy “, emphasizes the neurologist.
During his speech at the symposium, Manes will propose some daily actions to mitigate the emotional effects of the pandemic: maintain a sustainable routine, with reasonable hours; keeping in touch with our loved ones and taking care of physical health are some of them.
It is also “essential”, according to the neurologist, to “regulate exposure” to news about the pandemic “to avoid over-training and misinformation”, as well as to “savor the little things” of daily life, such as dancing, painting or singing. in order to generate that pleasant state in which “the notion of time, space and oneself diminishes”.
A “GREAT PSYCHOEDUCATION” AFTER THE PANDEMIC
And what can governments do to reverse this situation? According to Facundo Manes, politicians and administration officials, both in Argentina and in other countries, should launch a campaign of “mass psychoeducation”, something essential to preserve the “emotional, social and mental resources” of the population after the pandemic.
“Governments should use the information channels they have with massive psychoeducation and they don’t, there is no psychoeducation. Separating physical from mental health is something very old, obviously we have to worry about the virus, but how do they recover economically ? countries if people are burned? “asks the expert.
Precisely, this Wednesday’s symposium will try to expose what elements exist to avoid, as far as possible, that state of “burning” and achieve well-being even in the midst of a global health and economic crisis. EFE
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