“Adaptive Coping Strategy: Compartmentalize where possible.”

We are all going through so much. Each of us, whether you are a frontline healthcare professional or healthcare leader, is coping with the results of the ongoing pandemic in both adaptive and maladaptive ways. COVID-19 Depression is how we are now conceptualizing what we as individuals are experiencing and what we observe in others. Today, I provide a narrative of my own psychological and emotional difficulties that feel endlessly enduring as we enter the third year of living with this disease.

Welcome to Episode 61: Managing COVID-19 Depression

1. What We Do:
   
   • Behavioural Medicine and Health Psychology
     
   • Providing easily accessible content designed to help you design your own transformative experience.
     
   
   
2. Today:
   
   • My thoughts on living into the second year of COVID-19 and the impact on mood for myself and those around me.
     
   
   

COVID-19 Depression

1. Observations (Personal Experience)
   
   • Work in healthcare administration.
     
   • Frontline worker exhaustion.
     
   • Ongoing hiring crisis.
     
   • Unions taking advantage of Covid exhaustion.
     
   • Media taking advantage of fear for clicks.
     
   
   
2. Presentation and Definition
   
   • Deep feeling of impending doom.
     
   • Hopelessness and helplessness.
     
   • Fleeting thoughts of not wanting to go on.
     
   • Sleep disturbance.
     
   • Obsessive thinking – Difficult to refocus on the positive.
     
   • Physical exhaustion from increased levels of stress hormone.
     
   
   
3. Maladaptive Coping
   
   • Increased use of THC edibles.
     
   • Increased use of ETOH.
     
   • Bimodal focus – Work and home with nothing in-between.
     
   • Eating disorder (controlled vs. excess).
     
   • Purchasing with intent to distract – Brief hit of dopamine.
     
   • Distracting with anger (at others, politics, etc.)
     
   
   
4. Adaptive Coping
   
   • Physical activity (running)
     
   • Slow activities and food.
     
   • Media stimulus control.
     
   • Social support (partner, friends, family, church, colleagues).
     
   • Compartmentalize where possible.
     
   
   
5. Your Feedback
   
   • What are you doing to cope right now?
     
   • What maladaptive approaches are you buried into?
     
   • What adaptive approaches are you practicing?