Occupational Therapy News OTnews May 2020 | Page 20

FEATURE COVID-19 Diagnosing people with mental disorders can further negate their experiences and marginalise them. I am sure as a collective we would not stand for that. Its vital that we do not continue to allow this for others. We need to find new ways of connecting with people, of connecting people with each other. We need to rethink what accessibility means. We need to be more inclusive and better understand ours and other people’s experiences. We need to hold the hope for each other, to sit with the uncertainty together. We need to find new ways of doing, new ways of being. We need to find comfort in how communities are responding with compassion and creativity to get through this together, in the newfound appreciation for what had previously been taken for granted. – it is a normal response. We are struggling to participate in normal activities; going to the supermarket was once taken for granted but now littered with barriers. We cannot engage in our usual social occupations. We are fearful of contamination, of getting sick, for our loved ones. We are all facing the disabling impact of the current situation with work, food, money, isolation. It may be that it has taken a global pandemic to reframe how we see distress, to stop us putting a label on it and seeing it as something a person must fix, or that we must fix in them. Louise Kermode, Head of Services, Jami. email: [email protected] © GettyImages/RgStudio communities see mental health and exclude people experiencing mental health issues. It seems that overnight we have shifted to a place of mutual support, where we have a collective experience to make sense of. This is in direct contrast to the way in which a person might separate themselves from someone who has experiences that are different to their own, who behaves, thinks and feels differently from them or the societal norm. Sometimes people try to guard themselves, from the distress and pain felt by others by calling it ‘illness’, while asserting themselves as ‘well’ or having ‘good mental health’. The distress we are all feeling is justified, tangible and unifying us across continents; we are not all suffering from mental illness because we are fearful, anxious, feeling low or struggling with the day to day 20 OTnews May 2020 ‘‘ We need to find new ways of connecting with people, of connecting people with each other. We need to rethink what accessibility means. We need to be more inclusive and better understand ours and other people’s experiences..