Okay guys, it’s James here from Watson therapy today we’ve got Diane Stephens and she’s a therapist. Diane’s going to be talking about COVID-19 and surrounding issues regarding our mental health. So Diane, what can you tell us about COVID-19 and how it’s affecting us?

Well, James, I suppose is affecting everybody in different ways. And we’ve got a lot of Division I suppose in our society at the moment around, people going to work, people not going to work people, and isolating but people also screening. We’ve got parents that are trying to work and teach. We’ve got so many different arrays of issues out there and COVID-19 has introduced into our mental health.

And we’ve also got the obviously, underlying mental health issues for some of the society as well. And this is just adding to it. So it’s wide out there, James. There’s so many I’m here, the moment about anxiety, depression, worry, boredom, fear, absolute fear of what we’re going through and what the future is going to look like.

Yeah, I guess people are just so uncertain. You know, what’s going to happen to the economy? You know, how does, this affect my job, you know, whenever we kind of go back to normal might even be years until we’re really back to normal. And the economy’s like it was only days ago.

to look like because he’s not going to go back to normal as we know it, we don’t know what our high streets are going to look like. We don’t know what our schools are going to look like. We don’t know. You know how it’s going to affect our social relationships because are people going to have that trust back that we always had with our friends, you know, it was quite easy to walk into a room touch somebody give them a hug, and there’s going to be so much trust of people for some time, even if we come out of lockdown anytime soon.

There’s still a lot of people that are going to have mistrust about whether other people are taking the hygiene seriously. And, you know, whether they’re taking care of us in our workplace, whether they’re taking care of us in the dentist, the doctor surgeries, there’s going to be a lot of this that we haven’t really had before. So we have to really think about it.

So when you’re treating people like, what are they discussing in therapy, what sort of issues are coming up? Click here if you are looking Counselling in London.

Anxiety mostly and fear as I mentioned before, because we don’t know what things are going to look like, but a lot of people are clearly worried about their family, their loved ones. So I’m not just speaking to people that are directly affected, and maybe by key working and but people are worried about, you know, their daughters or their sons going into work, you know, being on the front line with the NHS and worrying about their health and they probably often look at to their grandchildren, and they’re not contributing and they’re feeling guilty.

There’s lots of feelings of guilt about not being able to help each other, even people living next door to each other, can’t pop around in the same way and help in the way we did. We can go shopping and leave it at the door, but it doesn’t feel enough. And so I think a lot of us are feeling quite helpless, as well as the, you know, the deep mental health issues. There’s lots of just surface stuff that we’ve not had to experience before.

Yeah, definitely and, you know, we were talking outside of this video about, you know, things that people are missing at the moment, you know, like, just being able to hug people and just go to restaurants. You know, I know I’m missing all those little things that I didn’t realize was quite a big part of my life. You know, not being able to go outside. I mean, I’ve had to work from home years and years ago.

But it’s different now because I can’t just go to a restaurant, you know, I can’t just go into town. To buy something, you know, I’ve got to order online now, you know, I just can’t do anything. And, like you say it’s really boring after like, this month or so I’ve locked down the iPads. And you know, I’m running out of stuff to do at home actually, I mean, I already have quite a lot of work anyway. So I’m running out of stuff too.

I suppose that’s another example of the [inaudible 04:22] James because you’re feeling bored and running out of things to do, where we might have a family that parents is home, or one of the parents are still working full time and trying to home school the children maybe haven’t got the skills to home school the children so that’s a worry and doing things that they perhaps wouldn’t normally have to do like domestic chores that maybe they have helped with before, but they can’t let people into the house so they perhaps don’t have their cleaners or their nannies or their gardeners, so yeah, there’s one extreme to the other.

Okay, Diane, so what are you doing at the moment in regards to helping people with their mental health?

So in terms of being a therapist and therapist who’s still working out there, we’re doing it very differently although some therapists are online therapists anyway. But therapists have changed their business so that they are now doing online sessions. So that can be Skype or Zoom or Telephone. So when people that do need the mental health support, and there is people out there still offering sessions.

So if you do feel you need counselling, and some people have put it on hold thinking, we’ll do all this on the lockdowns over if you do need it. There are people out there that can help you. Some therapists have turned their hand to helping local charities and they’re offering free services for the NHS and other key workers. So therapists are still trying to do as much as they can and getting information out there to help with mental health. And so don’t neglect your mental health if you need support, still seek it out.

And you know, for people at home, you know, if you are looking to book Diane you can give her a call and there will be a number in the description or maybe below on the screen right now. It will be in the description of this video so you know you can contact Diane at home and if you need therapy then you can get in contact with her.

Thank you, James.