Mass Panic Attack

I don’t recall the exact age I suffered my first panic attack, but I do remember how it felt. As my chest tightened and my breathing became shallow, my oxygen level dropped, and I thought I was going to die. Breathing is fundamental to life, and when it gets restricted, for whatever reason, we fear for our lives. Some people believe a panic attack starts in your head, but I beg to differ; panic attacks are based on emotions that underlie what the body perceives as threat, which is why many of us don’t really know what started the panic attack until we’ve calmed down enough to think it through.

When looked at from a psychological point of view, what we just witnessed over the past two years could be referred to as a Mass Panic Attack, the underpinning of which was a sense of generalized anxiety and uncertainty about our health, our lives, and our livelihoods.

It is well known in the world of psychology what causes anxiety, and these can be broken down into two categories. In the first category, someone lives through an experience that is so horrific – being raped or buried in an avalanche – the fear lives on in their body even after the immediate threat is gone. And the second category is when someone lives through a protracted period of uncertainty – a war or an abusive relationship – to the point where there is a generalized feeling of helplessness that lives inside their bodies. The level of uncertainty that causes this can differ from person to person, what does not differ is the outcome, which is a deterioration of their state of mental health.

Over the past two years, we experienced this second category of anxiety en masse. This type of low-grade background stress slowly beats down the individual’s mental state until they are not operating at peak efficiency, let alone inner equilibrium. Add in the attendant loss of productivity, creativity and general level of well-being in the population, as well as the division sewn by post-truth disinformation campaigns, and you have a recipe for full-blown mass psychosis.

Like all psychological states, the antidote is at hand. To reduce anxiety, people need sovereignty returned to them so they can go back to their lives of purpose and meaning. To lower cognitive dissonance, they need honest and transparent information about what is really going on, and the freedom to choose how to navigate it. Over the past two years, our leaders and their propaganda arms have engaged in hyperbolic fear-mongering that has allowed them to centralize power and control into ever more tightening circles. They have manipulated numbers and twisted statistics to achieve their own ends. Knowing this, we need to step away from the media campaigns, clear our minds, and take a grounded look at who and what the real threats are.

I propose there is a way out of this Mass Panic Attack, and it is a refusal to go along with unlawful, unscientific and inhuman lockdowns and mandates that the leaders who impose them don’t even follow. It is time to resist, en masse, what will kill our economy and our futures if we continue to adhere to it. Because the veil is wearing thin, and the economic devastation left in the wake of the virus will do much more damage than the actual virus ever could.