How do faithless people like me make sense of this past year of Covid?

‘Many of us yearn for meaning. But in our individualistic, secular society we lack even the flimsiest of narratives to guide us...

‘Long before Covid’s arrival, it was clear this was something too many people were losing touch with. Through decades of secularisation, cheered on by irreligious liberals, not nearly enough thought was ever given to what might take on the social roles of a church. The demise of the factory and the collectivised lives that went with it marked another loss. And now, long years of cuts have obliterated many of the shared spaces we had left, from libraries and Sure Starts to community centres.

‘The pandemic has shone unforgiving light on the consequences. A British Academy report on “the long-term societal impacts of Covid-19” found that the age group most likely to experience loneliness during the first lockdown was 16- to 24-year-olds. In the past decade, spending in England and Wales on youth services has been cut by 70%. As life after Covid unfolds, such choices will look not just reckless but downright cruel.

‘Three years ago, Anthony Costello – a former director of maternal and child health at the World Health Organization – published a book titled The Social Edge, focused on the so-called “sympathy groups” that sit between the state and the individual. “Religious or therapy groups have always offered solace and peace and relaxation and friendship,” he wrote. “They help us in our spiritual quest for meaning and wellbeing.” Church groups, choirs, sport and dance clubs, he went on, “bring harmony and relaxation to tired minds” and give people “a greater sense of being alive”.

‘Costello proposed using similar structures to tackle loneliness in old age, prisoner recidivism, “stress in motherhood” and much more. Now, in the context of Covid and its long-term social effects, this sounds like something millions of us might sooner or later need. Whatever our experiences, what we have all been through is huge. And as an act of post-pandemic healing, encouraging the growth of such initiatives would surely not be too hard. Fund and create public spaces – parks, halls, arts venues, meeting rooms – and revive the most grassroots aspects of local government, and you would create roughly the right conditions.’

Read here (The Guardian, Mar 28, 2021)

The play cure: In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma – and out the other side...

‘Take a pen. Place it on the paper. Draw wherever you want. However you want. You know, Paul Klee said: “Drawing is like taking a line for a walk.”’ In the hospital workshop, I turn towards a patient, smile and continue: ‘So, let’s draw together. We could draw houses, and draw a path between our homes. Let’s grab paints. Turn the paper around. Upside down. If you don’t mind, I can paint your sky and you can paint mine… We can play and make…’

‘For more than 20 years, I’ve been saying these sentences, playing and making, as a clinical arts therapist, specialising in mental health, and as a lecturer and consultant using creative techniques with doctors, hospital directors, nursing managers and entrepreneurs. Guided by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Jackson Pollock, and by Plato, I spend my days tapping into what the phenomenologist and philosopher of play Eugen Fink calls the ‘peach skin of things’. It glows.’

Two paragraphs that may interest you to read the whole story

• ‘Play, as Fink writes, unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’. For years, I worked with teenagers diagnosed with psychosis. A highlight of our work was a short surrealist play, ‘The Lost Potato Masher’, which they devised based around kitchen objects. The main roles were taken by a fridge, a cupboard, a toaster, a cooker, a table and chairs, and the lost potato masher. The text dealt with parental abandonment, despair, solitude, violence, fate and hope. In a training context, a hospital manager, in an improvisation, once acted the role of the file of a dead patient that had been thrown into a bin. Both of these examples show the cathartic effect of play, allowing us to sit with our shadows...
• ‘A recent study by the psychologists Maja Stanko-Kaczmarek and Lukasz Kaczmarek at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland found that the tactile sensations of finger-painting provoked a state of mindfulness connected with wellbeing. As we paint, we’re present in the moment, and we have a broader attention. This can be contrasted with the ‘mindlessness’ state, often a symptom of mental illness, characterised by past or future ruminations. The physical nature of play and making locates us in the here and now: it centres us in ourselves, mobilising an embodied cognition that’s important in skill learning. At all stages of life, Lego-making, knitting, embroidery and painting can contribute to psychological wellbeing.’

Read here (Aeon, Feb 4, 2021)

How to heal the 'mass trauma' of Covid-19

‘When the pandemic is over, how should we process the memories of what happened? Ed Prideaux discovers counter-intuitive answers from the science of trauma... 

• What happens when trauma goes viral
• How trauma affects groups and individuals
• The problem of forgetting

‘Covid-19 is a mass trauma the likes of which we've never seen before. Our most complex social extensions, and the building-blocks of our personal realities, have been coloured indelibly. The ways we live and work together, and view each other as common citizens: everything means something different in the viral era, and with potentially traumatic effect. 

‘All pandemics end, however. And this one will. But to forget the trauma, move on, and pay it no mind, won't help. It'd be a disservice to history and our own minds. Maybe to the future, too. ’

Read here (BBC, Feb 4, 2021)