Why Did Mental Health Professionals Go Along With Lockdowns?

 Occasionally there was a suggestion that socially-distanced outdoor interactions might be acceptable or that phased school reopenings could be attempted. But, by and large, very few mental health professionals, like so many people from so many other fields, had the courage to present any real challenge to these policies despite knowing the damage they wrought. 

Another 2022 review, this one focusing on mental health in children and adolescents, similarly found a general decline in mental health with increases in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation with older adolescents and girls hit the hardest.

From virtually the start of the pandemic, there was no shortage of mental health professionals willing to state the obvious effect that social distancing and lockdowns would have on mental health, as it is well established that social isolation is deleterious to the mental and physical health of social mammals.

What is surprising is that a fair number of mental health professionals even sometimes appeared to search for some kind of rote technological means to fulfill social needs while in some instances even opining about the need to convince people to accept if not embrace their isolation as acceptable, necessary, and even normal, in essence validating all of Chief Bromden's suspicions about psychiatry's place in The Combine and doing Nurse Ratched proud.

Others without the name recognition or reach also warned of the dangers of lockdowns to mental health and advocated for or at least seemed to advocate for a lifting of such restrictions in both interviews with local press and in peer-reviewed publications.

Statements such as those and calls to end lockdowns by mental health professionals were definitely not the norm for the greater part of the Pandemic Era.

In an editorial titled "COVID 19 and Its Mental Health Consequences" and published by the Journal of Mental Health in 2021, a pair of scholars referred to lockdowns as an "Important strategy to break the chain of transmission."

Once more, in these articles there was rarely any real discussion of whether the costs of lockdowns outweighed their presumed benefits by the mental health professionals and researchers writing these papers. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/why-did-mental-health-professionals-go-along-with-lockdowns/