I know the doctors are rather busy at the moment, fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and all, but I think some researcher somewhere should look into the plague of electionitis that seems to be sweeping across the land.
Electionitis is a word I made up to describe all the people who are sick of the election or who have been made sick because of it. Symptoms of it may be mild like a runny nose, nausea and trouble concentrating or more extreme like uncontrolled babbling, swearing, and shouting obscenities. It might be more of a syndrome then an actual disease or illness, but it does seem to be contagious and spreading. One cure would be to put things into perspective or to stop listening to the news.
When I was in high school, which was granted a long time ago, the school use to have Pep Rallies before a big sporting event. The theory was that it would get the students excited about the event. so they would come out and support the team by cheering them on. I am not sure how effective they were, but I look at political campaigns as doing the same thing. Unfortunately, what may get some people exceed for that team may also upset people who support other teams. So it can have different effects on different people.
It would be interesting, if some of these events were rated, how much good do they do vs how much bad. Let’s just consider covid for a moment. You may get the illness or not but think of all the people who have stress, worry and nervous symptoms, just with all the reporting on covid. Is there such a thing as coviditus where you don’t have covid, but you get sick from all the talk and control measures used against covid. Could electionitus and coviditus be real things, just not recognized, described, or quantified, yet.
The other day I got a letter from the government, out of the blue. And yes, getting a letter is sometimes not a good thing so I am sure my anxiety level and blood pressure went up a little. Then I had to read the letter through several times to understand what it was saying. It turned out OK, but it did obviously put me through a little emotional turmoil and when I was done, I looked at the letter and thought “why does the government do this to people.” They seem to go out of their way to make things overly complicated and not easy to understand.
The letter could have said. “Don’t worry and you don’t have to do anything. In the language of bureaucracy, we are going to try to explain the unexplainable because the rules say we have to try.” Problem solved. Let’s keep it simple and understandable.
These are trying times we are going through, but humans have been through much worse. Here in Canada, there was the first world war, the flu pandemic, the great depression, the dust bowl and then the second world war. These things happened and people survived. It’s a case of live and learn and always put things in perspective.
Recently the various political parties have been talking about putting a lot of money into mental health. I think that is a good thing because they have been basically ignoring it for decades. However, I would like to see some of that money going into studies about why mental health is such an issue and what is causing it. Especially, what are governments and politicians doing that is negatively affecting people’s mental health.
People do react to the way they are treated and all to often the government treats people as numbers not as individuals. I take it back to bush camps. If you have a camp with a good boss people’s attitude and mental health is better, then if they have a lousy boss.
These things do matter. Personally, I think our leaders could do a lot better.
