What symptoms of acute stress can be identified in the population from the pandemic?
Acute stress is associated with a near-death experience or a threat to physical integrity. In response to this actual event the individual reacts on the basis of his or her quadruple response system: physiological, emotional, behavioral and cognitive, under the direction of the brain.
- Physiological: tension, feelings of nervousness, jolts, stomach pain, visceral.
- Emotional: irritability, fears, feeling of loss of control, fear of exposure.
- Cognitive: repetitive thoughts associated with being safe, automatic thoughts of regaining control.
- Behavioral: confinement, hand washing, social distancing, not being in public spaces.
We have a pandemic that affects the entire planet, we have a confinement that deprives us of our nature of freedom. Its condition of prolonged and uncertain duration is a key element for it to become a trauma with an onset in acute stress and trigger a mild or chronic post-traumatic stress, based on the duration of the event, generating other more serious disorders and that, in the worst situations, can lead to suicidal behavior.
In a situation of acute stress, the brain has the responsibility to restore balance and the commitment to find an adequate response. To this end, the CNS and the autonomic or peripheral SN are activated. The repertoire of previously learned responses is crucial for the coordination and execution of the most effective response.
What symptoms do children and youth present with?
Any mammal will experience isolation as a traumatic factor, since its nature is the availability of freedom, depriving it of its smile.
In the case of children, the symptomatology is accentuated because they take what is around them as true, their level of criticism is very low or null, their brain is developing and mixes it with an absolute and immovable functional learning, true in their personality structure and they may have to undergo therapy to unlearn and discard that truth: “the world is dangerous and I have to keep myself safe… and my family too”.
Their learning is more camouflaged, invisible as children have an apotheosized adaptation to the environment, but often the impact on their developing brain goes unnoticed.
The stress symptoms presented by the pandemic are natural responses to a fear of contracting an unknown disease that is real. For this reason, they will be associated with the degree of need for control, degree of responsibility of protection before our own, degree of defenselessness before adaptive responses and survival instinct, being able to become obsessive or compulsive.
The stress symptoms presented by confinement have to do with responses to control this fear and are directly proportional to the needs described above. These responses to keep us safe, in our comfort zone, can trigger serious disorders such as those mentioned above.
For more information about the effects that Covid-19 and confinement can cause, contact a specialist in Psychology.