Emotional Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Ethical and Psychological Aspects

Abstract

The role of emotions in our lives can hardly be overestimated. Joy, confidence, unity and solidarity with other people are able to give strength, help withstand difficult times and inspire exploits. Whereas grief, fear, loneliness, anxiety and apathy, when they also last a long time, can destroy not only a person's mental and physical health, but also radically change their beliefs and values. The pandemic has caused damage not only to the physical health of people in all countries, with a significant deadly harvest and continuing its sinister course to this day: it has also caused deep emotional wounds that are still difficult to count and identify.  Self-isolation and strict control by the state, far from always compensated by the care expected of its fellow citizens, have increased feelings of loneliness, fear and anxiety. In addition, the justifiability of such harsh measures, which violate basic constitutional human rights and have caused much harm, is in many cases less obvious. Also, one of the most important reasons for grievous emotions and feelings is that everyone has seen the state of crisis that our medicine is in. "Optimisation" of it led to the fact that the most valuable achievements of Soviet medicine, whose authors were talented world-class specialists, were forgotten [4]. At the same time, the reasons for the lack of positive emotions are not only the deadly disease itself, which is undoubtedly dangerous and has not yet been investigated, but also the side effects of the pandemic in the form of long-term stress and so-called "info-demia", emotional infection and "poisoning" with negative information that has swept the world through TV and computer screens.