The Silent Pandemic After the Pandemic: The Global Mental Health Crisis

I emerged out of the Covid pandemic lockdown bubble in 2021 but only really started reconnecting with many old friends and acquaintances in 2022. 

Fast forward to 2024, what has struck me are the lasting scars the pandemic and the now widely condemned lockdowns have caused people. I now know countless couples divorced or separated. And many of our kids are irreparably harmed psychologically or developmentally. This is not some random observation but a trend I’ve noticed in a sample set of dozens if not a hundred or so folks in relatively deeper conversations. 

I’ve widely written about how badly the lockdown affected my family for the worst. It caused me massive financial pain and due to my own weakness, led to the unintentional damage for the rest of my family. It also stripped bare any illusions I had regarding my ability to provide, how strong a husband and capable of a dad I was. O for 3 in 2020. Some of these, I’m still working very hard to sort out.

When I feel helplessness or fear, it quickly turns to rage. And in a situation where dojos, parks, gyms and churches were closed, there were literally no outlets for this. 

Multiply this situation to almost every family in the world to different degrees of severity and you see the endemic rash of violence, suicide and loneliness of many young and old people now. The amount of broken families whether here in California, Canada, India, Australia, China or anywhere in the world. I know very few people unaffected. 

The only good thing to come out of all of this is an openness now to therapy and the importance of mental health, things that were taboo to speak about prior in society. 

The other big thing I’ve learned is that I will never blindly follow what the media or our so-called experts in government and corporations say. These people are either corrupt or incompetent. It reminds of the old Hollywood saw “Nobody Knows Nothing.” And it’s funny that many of the things labeled conspiracies turned out to be true like the virus coming from a lab, the lockdowns & masks being useless and the health effects/issues with the Covid vaccines. 

The price of not being prepared or not thinking for yourself is high. This is why having financial independence is so important, you need the resources to leave and or/ protect ourselves from overarching malicious or incompetent bureaucrats. 

The big lesson is: if you panic, panic early and take action. Use your extensive resources and leave. 

My big mistake was that I made assumptions that the lockdowns would be short. I should have taken my family directly to Taiwan or Vancouver that first week of March 2020. Now I am literally paying for it in the thousands of dollars of therapy every month to repair the extensive damage from those hellish 6 months locked in. Well, live and learn. I can tell you this, nobody and nothing will stop me in the future. 

So remember folks, take care of your mental health. Therapy is a good thing. And when the next major global crisis happens, panic early and don’t trust our elites. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”