A 12-Step Guide to Staying Sane During the Plague Year
How Bruckner, Scott, “Doctor Who” — and tea — helped this columnist survive the pandemic.
Give Proust a chance — as an audiobook.
Photographer: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images
Maybe you stayed safe in the plague year. Most of us have. But did you stay sane? A growing body of research shows that the damage to our health caused by COVID-19 went far beyond the disease itself. In addition to multiple physiological conditions that have claimed lives because people eschewed medical care they would normally have sought, a great many of us have suffered psychologically — some from fear of infection, some from protracted incarceration with their nearest and dearest, many from the enforced isolation that does not come naturally to our species. Survey data from the United States, China and other countries point to a pandemic of depression, anxiety and stress.
I’ve had the good fortune to avoid both physical and mental illness in 2020. As a repressed misanthrope — who for many years was forced by circumstances to be much more gregarious than I really am — I have positively relished nine months in one place with a social circle confined to my wife, my two youngest children, and a handful of local friends. (I cannot speak for the other inhabitants of my bubble.)