COVID-19 Hysteria: a “Chinese whispers” kind of game or a cause for psychiatric pathology?
COVID-19 Hysteria: a “Chinese whispers” kind of game or a cause for psychiatric pathology?

Summary/Abstract: The media is unofficially considered the fourth largest power in the state. The motivation forthis statement is remarkable. Through the press and audiovisual, the culture, perceptions,values, tendencies, decisions, and reactions of individuals are significantly influenced. Butdoes it also affect psychiatric pathology? Although the sources of the news are required to bereliable, we do not always enjoy truthfulness or transparency. In the current social climate,unhappily animated by the hysteria of COVID-19, more and more people fall prey to anxiety,stress, depression, or even suicide. Fear of illness, social isolation, job loss, uncertaintylooming over the near or distant future only complete this landscape of collective suffering.Fear arises from questions whose answer either does not exist or does not satisfy and can giverise to insecurity, despair, and sometimes even cruelty. Unfortunately, this whole collage ofunhappiness is distinguished by a rapid increase. The economic crisis is expected to be heavierthan in 2008, the unemployment rate has already reached alarming levels and continues torise. This upheaval will add up in the future, as the lessons of past epidemics and pandemicsteach us, to multiple pathologies of psychiatric origin. Post-traumatic stress syndrome,depression, anxiety, obsessive disorder and hypochondriac syndromes are just a few pieces ofthis mosaic.

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