Also, David Brooks' piece on mental health in the age of the coronavirus is worth reading...
The pandemic spreads an existential feeling of unsafety, which registers in the neurons around your heart, lungs and viscera. It alters your nervous system, changing the way you see and perceive threat..It’s very hard to grasp what’s going on so deep inside. “All trauma is preverbal,” Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in his book “The Body Keeps the Score.” “Rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”...The best way to combat this visceral sense of fear and disassociation is by having ... experiences of deep reciprocal attunement with others that make you feel viscerally safe...I asked the experts whether they thought it was possible to have this sort of deep, visceral attunement over the internet. They thought it was, as long you can see the other person’s face and hear vocal tone. “The internet is a huge variable in this pandemic,” Dr. van der Kolk told me. “We have a profound new way to comfort one another.”
