How are you feeling?

Four months ago, I saw on Facebook an "ad" for a research project:

<<The research is conducted by clinical psychologists at the University of Oxford and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. The research is approved by the University of Oxford Central University Research Ethics Committee (R69638/RE001). It is funded by the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre.>> 

The research is looking into how people's mental health is being affected by Covid-19 and it asks for volunteers. If you're interested in taking part, please don't contact me. Google one of the organisations above. 

I agreed to take part back in May. I filled in a long and detailed questionnaire, and now the researchers are back to ask more questions, albeit in a slightly shorter questionnaire, thankfully. I'm guessing here, in a totally amateurish way, that their first bit of research maybe gave the researchers reasons to do a follow-up - in other words, they found grounds for further research, although I'm not in a position to say what these grounds were. Maybe they always planned to do a longitudinal piece of research. Maybe a new budget kicked in at the start of the new financial year. 

I'm interested in this kind of research. For one thing, I'm not aware of other research projects into the mental health of "the elderly" and, while this project is not exclusively about older people, we're not excluded. That in itself is unusual. I think that kind of research is needed. 

If other research projects involving older people exist, please let me know. 

Obviously, I'm interested in this because I'm old. Well, not in my head. I find myself looking at the people around me and wondering: who are all these old people? But I'm also impressed that this research is longitudinal, rather than a one-off dive into what people are experiencing during the pandemic. 

For another, I have the horrible feeling any work being done on supporting people's mental health - and not just in the UK - in the pandemic is maybe at the "crisis' end of the spectrum rather than dealing with prevention. And yes, although I've no evidence, not even anecdotal, I suspect that's a major flaw in a lot of our mental health work: we wait till there's a crisis and then look to overstretched services to 'rescue' people. Anything that supports prevention has to be a good thing in my opinion. 

The third thing is that I can already see a change in my own mental health. No, don't worry: this isn't going to be a confession, any more than the title of this blog post means I'm setting you a "test".

I have colitis. I'd be absolutely stupid to risk my health (my life?) in a pandemic if I didn't take suitable precautions. I'm definitely more careful in my outings and my contacts with the rest of the world. That means I'm more isolated. And I've noticed that a lot of my friends now refuse to go out to the kind of social gatherings we all used to take for granted: lunch, coffee, afternoon tea, family meet-ups, cultural visits.  

For months, I've been writing off - and mourning the loss of - these outings. 

There's also the issue of medication. I take steroids. I hate them. The side effects are awful. Yes, I know all medication has side effects but the steroids I take for colitis have an effect on the personality as well as physical effects. I've had to train myself to stay off social media because a build-up of steroids makes me grumpy (well, more grumpy). I wonder if that effect will come up in the research. Or is anyone else researching this? 

The one point I wonder about is how people are being supported. I've no experience of care homes or day centres but I can see that my neighbours who used to go to day centres or just up the road for a pint in the pub are no longer going out. Some have carers who visit for 15 minutes two or three times a day. Who supports them the rest of the time? All of this must impinge on their mental health. 

I'm not having a dig at carers or social workers. We are asking our care and health services to do ridiculous things in the pandemic and it annoys me that some politicians and a lot of journalists carry on as if life can be normal - for example, as if there are hundreds of thousands of people out there employed to service the state: carers, civil servants, local government employees. And any problem is due to these 'government-employed' people not doing their job. Anyone who knows the situation will know how foolish this attitude is.  

It was a politician who set me off tonight: a man of little intellect and no political experience called the First Minister a liar in parliament. He was staging a stunt to get publicity for himself in the middle of the second wave of a pandemic. Did his stunt improve the health and well-being of people in Scotland? Is the pandemic under control any more than it was thanks to him?