THE AGE OF FEAR

COVID’S DEADLY SECOND WAVE HAS SPARKED OFF A ‘FEARODEMIC’. PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF DYING, OF LOSING THEIR LOVED ONES, OF BEING ALONE, OF LOSING THEIR JOBS—ANXIETIES THAT ADD A NEW DIMENSION OF MENTAL-HEALTH ISSUES TO THE ONGOING CRISIS

- SUHANI SINGH

Dr Harish Shetty, a renowned psychiatrist in Mumbai, is all too familiar with the mental fallout of a disaster. In his 33-yearlong career, he has helped survivors of the 1993 Latur earthquake in Maharashtra, the 1998 Kandla cyclone in Gujarat and the 2002 Gujarat riots process their individual and collective grief: the loss of home, the loss of loved ones, the loss of life as you knew it. Covid-19, however, is an “invisible enemy”. “The fear of a visible enemy can be delineated, imagined, circumscribed in the mind,” he explains. “Here, because of the invisibility of the perpetrator, the fear is multiplied a millionfold. There, the impact of the disaster was at one go; here, it is endless.” Shetty, in fact, has coined a new term to sum up our collective state of mind: ‘fearodemic’.

Anxiety has hit a peak in a nation where, as per a 2019 report published by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), some 197.3 million people live with mental disorders. It has only been exacerbated by Covid’s deadlier second wave, which has claimed 114,860 lives in just a month between April 25 and May 25, compared with the seven months it took to reach 114,682 deaths in the previous wave.

First, there is the fear of the disease itself. All through April, the only thing 27-year-old Vaibhav (