Learning from COVID-19

“Life as we know it, at least for a time, has changed so significantly we are reimagining our futures in a variety of ways, with no idea what’s really in store for us. We are collectively holding our breath, fearing the worst and hoping for the best. Never has there been a greater opportunity to stop pathologising the emotional experiences of human beings and start connecting over commonality, sharing stories and strategies to collectively work our way forward.”

The global COVID-19 pandemic has created a societal crisis impacting health and particularly our mental health. The pandemic has challenged our beliefs about what is ‘normal’ and whether reality is still ‘normal’. The language of reality and normality used here reflects the language of diagnosis and encourages us to consider how we categorise people based on their perception of reality.

This article, from Florence et al, published in Psychosis in September 2020, challenges us to privilege lived experience in a time when suddenly whole communities are experiencing distress and reality is no longer familiar. Florence et al encourage us to learn from people with lived experience of mental health challenges and the knowledge they hold about how to manage experiences of reality becoming uncertain and unpredictable.

Three key actions are suggested:

1. Use a recovery framework. Recovery is not to ‘restore or reclaim a former sense of normality, but to forge new pathways and create one’s life beyond the constraints and limitations […] imposed by reality itself‘. Society can learn from the community of lived experience in how to build a new future not constrained by what has happened or what lay ‘before’ a life-changing event.

2. Challenging notions of normality. What happens when reality breaks from all of our understanding? Will we persevere with pathologising our experiences or look for a new way to describe our experience? This will impact upon whether we respond with a clinical response to a pathology or a societal response to a crisis. We need to see this as an unprecedented collective experience of suffering and find ‘equally collective solutions’.

3. Address health inequities. We are well accustomed in the lived experience community to identifying health inequities. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed health inequities locally, as well as internationally. Florence et al call for an ‘urgent need for health systems to reorganise themselves to prioritise faster and broader access to government aid and community resources’.

The global pandemic has created a crisis opportunity. We can respond by learning from those with lived experience, and their experiential knowledge of what works when reality breaks from us. “This is an optimal time to invite lived experience wisdom to centre stage. While Covid-19 is not the great equalizer – because lives appear to be being separated into expendable and not expendable – it is our responsibility to make sure that the new reality from the crucible of Covid-19 brings new equity”.

As New Zealand moves into further stages of its pandemic response, let’s choose to learn from those who hold this wisdom.