Medcast news and blog
Writing your COVID worries away - (with Andrew Gan and Dr Jet)
COVID and all its attendant inconveniences (I guess some would say “tortures”) has forced many of us to revise our personal wellbeing plans and dig out some old strategies that we haven’t used for a while. It’s also made some of us realise that many of the things that we thought were just parts of our normal life were, in fact, wellness strategies.
READ ON
My patients are loving telehealth. They love it so much that most of them are saying they don’t want to come back to face to face consultations. You probably need to bear in mind that my patients are long-term therapy patients that I know very well.
Is Acadia running your life right now? Are you, like the solitary monks who used that term in the middle ages, suffering from the combination of boredom, frustration, agitation and lethargy that comes with physical isolation?
Like me, you probably spend a lot of time talking to people about how they feel about the COVID 19 pandemic, but do you talk to them about their thoughts and beliefs about it?
Suicide in Australia amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples occur at twice the rate of the general population. Young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are at even greater risk, those aged 5 to 17 years, suicide is the leading cause of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
Right now, most of us are a bit upset in one way or another. Some of us are very upset. Stress, frustration, grief, anxiety, sadness, isolation, loneliness, worry about the present, worry about the future – all these things are rising to the surface in a world that’s being held to ransom by COVID 19.
At 65 and a half (yes, it’s come to that. I’m actually counting the months again!) I find myself reluctantly looking down the barrel of a shotgun labelled “old age”. It’s OK, don’t panic – I’m not unwell. It’s just that my body hurts and people keep asking me when I am going to retire. What is that!
Has anyone heard that or a variation of it recently? I’ll bet you have! Many years ago, before I had kids of my own, I used to hear my brother-in-law saying to his bored and whining kids “Come on then, I’ll give you a job. I’ve got plenty for you to do.”
A friend mentioned a really great way for managing this which I have been using and sharing with others. As people are going to have different comfort levels when it comes to spending time together, she told me about sharing her COVID social comfort level with others via a number and asking them for theirs before spending time together.
It’s always helpful to hear how other people cope. Over the next few weeks we are dedicating the Being Well blog to a series called Being Well in Difficult Times. In this blog post we speak to Talah - a a Gumbaynggirr/Yaegl young person who shares her experience of COVID-19.