The psychology of pandemic is emerging as an important current field in professional psychology. The entire field of professional psychology and psychotherapy only developed less than 100 years ago, and the Covid-19 pandemic is the first major pandemic that has occurred within the scope of professional psychology’s existence.

The global scope of the pandemic and major lock-down and home-confinement for vast populations create a context of fear, social isolation, uncertainty, and financial hardship that will be a source of severe complex trauma for many.

Each stage of development will respond to the complex trauma of pandemic differently.

• Young children will resonate and feel the impact of their parents’ increased anxiety and stress.
• Older school-age children will experience the additional stresses of disrupted school schedules and peer social involvement.
• Adolescents will experience severe disruptions to peer social development and increased anxieties about their launching into young adulthood.
• Young adults will experience major disruptions to their entry into their careers, and substantial increases in anxiety and stress.
• Mature adults raising families will have increased stress and anxiety from financial insecurities, as well as coping with major disruptions to their children’s school and life schedules.
• Older adults will experience increased medical anxieties and fears from social contact, and increased social isolation as a result.

Parents under stress have less patience. Children under stress emit more protest behavior to elicit increased parental involvement.

Parents under significant personal stress and anxiety are less likely to respond appropriately, and angry-frustrated parenting will increase as parents will have limited personal resources available for nurture.

Fear and anxiety trigger our attachment system, our regulatory system for threat – come together. Yet in a pandemic the appropriate medical-social response is self-isolation – exactly the opposite of our motivations from our attachment networks.

The social isolation will significantly exacerbate anxieties and fears as coping responses of social bonding are countermanded by orders for social isolation.

Immense uncertainty regarding what happens next and the inability to plan ahead will further exacerbate already substantial fears and anxieties. The entire world is both dangerous and uncertain.

This creates the psychology of pandemics – a form of trauma.

The horsemen of trauma, war, famine, and plague – we are developing the psychology of pestilence, the psychology of pandemic, and our response.

Our coping response to most trauma is to struggle through, to come together, not with this pathology, not with pandemic. The appropriate coping response is to surrender and to go into social isolation.

The psychology of pandemics are opposite of what we need to do, and doing what we need to do will be traumatic.

Solutions

Social isolation presents unique challenges, the Internet presents unique opportunities. Online social media, including video-conferencing, can break though the social isolation imposed by pandemic and allow the regulation of fears and anxieties through the attachment networks of social bonding.

Professional psychology can reach the isolated through tele-psychology, online HIPAA compliant platforms for online psychotherapy. Cyberspace knows no geographical limitations, the psychology of pandemics and the treatment of its complex trauma must move into cyberspace.

The attachment system is active – come together – professional pandemic psychology needs to respond to and facilitate this coping response. It is time for Internet psychology and tele-health to step into their proper and necessary roles in cyberspace.

Cyberspace is not the “real world,” it’s different in important ways. It both loses and it gains as a different medium from “real world” in-person communication, it is important to understand both the losses and the gains from cyberspace.

Both Internet psychology generally and pandemic psychology in specific will need to develop and define an approach to the complex trauma of pandemics. This will not be the last.

The unresolvable anxiety, fear, and trauma of pandemic, exacerbated significantly by social isolation, is real. Professional psychology must respond with treatment. That treatment response is found in cyberspace and tele-psychology – employing to its full value the new medium of social bonding – the Internet.

A new field of professional psychology is emerging – the psychology of pandemics and the treatment of pandemic induced complex trauma.

War – famine – pestilence – the horsemen of trauma. Professional psychology must step into our role of recovery and support.

Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, PSY 18857