New York is fighting a second battle aside from the coronavirus: mental health. The NYC branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness saw a 60% rise in calls to its help line in the last two weeks of March.
Whether it’s loneliness, grief, depression, or even panic attacks that imitate the symptoms of the disease itself, the coronavirus has placed a heavy mental burden on New Yorkers, creating a second major public health crisis alongside the deadly pandemic.
The issue is also a national one, and the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in March included $425 million for mental health and substance-use disorder programs, as well as $50 million for suicide-prevention programs nationwide. Treating patients over the phone In his daily news conference on March 25, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the launch of a statewide COVID-19 Emotional Support Hotline, which would be staffed by 6,000 mental health professionals who had volunteered their services.
While it may seem like a stopgap, therapy sessions conducted over the phone can work, and are far better than having no therapy options at all. “We definitely see increases in social isolation being a potential exacerbator of things like anxiety, worry, depression,” Rego said. “We’re social beings. We haven’t built our society with something like this in mind. But while [prior to the pandemic] we saw a [mental health] downside to social media and social platforms, now they’re an advantage because we can capitalize on all these tools that allow us to still connect to people.
Any resources being made available will likely need to remain in place for the foreseeable future, and that New York’s government may well end up taking cues from its longer-term response to past tragedies.
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