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This thread is not a place to discuss the merits of quarantine or the validity of the Covid-19 virus/pandemic. It is a discussion on quarantine's detrimental effects on addiction, mental health, trauma, etc. It is also a place for people to find support for those struggles.
TW: Suicide, trauma, depression, addiction, etc.
I found out last night that two men who had a mild amount of influence on me in my childhood both committed suicide in the past several months. One was a talented local magician who frequently performed at events at my elementary school. The other was a director at a summer camp that I went to for a few years. Both were talented, brilliant, inspirational men who brightened every room they entered. Who will never have the opportunity to do that again outside of photos and memories and old video camera footage.
It's gotten me thinking about the effect that quarantine has had on addiction, mental health, suicide, and trauma. How many lives we have lost not just from the virus itself, but from people being stuck inside as a result of it.
I want this thread to be a place where people can discuss the effect that quarantine has had on the mental health and drug use of themselves and their loved ones, share their stories, and get some support while they face these struggles. I know that we already have the 2021 Suicide Support Thread, but I believe that this issue is different enough to warrant its own thread.
I'm going to first share some personal anecdotes about myself and people I know, and then end the post with some scientific data showing that this phenomenon is not just anecdotal and is in fact a massive epidemic.
I want everyone who is reading this and struggling with mental health, trauma, addiction, suicidal thoughts, the loss of someone close to you, or anything else to know that you are not alone in your suffering, and that we are here for you.
Anecdotal Evidence:
Numerous people close to me have suffered from worsening depression and addiction throughout the past two years. I know people who previously had zero issues with mental illness and developed depression in 2020. I've also seen many Bluelighters deal with relapses, addiction, and worsening mental health as a result of the pandemic. I have many friends who were stuck living with emotional/physical/sexual abusers due to the pandemic. I know others who were kicked out and unable to/had extreme difficulty finding places to stay due to the combination of increased need for public services and decreased shelter capacity due to pandemic restrictions. I'll share a few specific cases of very close friends struggling with addiction and mental health, but I will attempt to protect the privacy of everyone involved:
One of my best friends lives with his emotionally manipulative/abusive parents and as a result he developed both a weed addiction (cannabis often gave him mild psychosis and he became psychologically dependent on it) and a short Xanax addiction at the start of the pandemic. He has since been over a year clean from both after spending almost a year at one of those 'troubled-teen' facilities. After reading the Joe vs. Elan comics, from what he told me it seems like he was lucky enough to end up at a facility less harmful and extreme than most.
My other best friend seems to be currently developing a DXM addiction. He used cannabis quite heavily throughout the pandemic, though in his case he was mostly using medical marijuana with decent CBD levels and it seemed to have treated many of his mental health issues without much negative effect.
A very close friend of mine has also dealt with worsening addictions to weed (made him a lot duller mentally, significantly worsened his depression and other mental health issues) and alcohol as well as numerous benzo binges. He is on his 2nd attempt at quitting weed and just hit a month clean. He chilled out with the alcohol (now he drinks but doesn't get blackout drunk every time like he used to) and plans to quit both alcohol and benzos starting January 1st.
A few people I considered close friends two years ago became addicted to meth, destroyed their lives and relationships, and most of them either got kicked out by their parents or left and became homeless. While in all honestly most of them were already pretty horrible people, it's still pretty sad to see people destroy their lives; Especially before they even turn 18 (Said people were 1-2 years younger than me.)
I personally did not develop any addiction (although I did use a lot of DXM in summer 2020), but living with my abusers full-time and having little face-to-face interaction with anyone outside of my immediate family certainly took a toll on my mental health. I honestly had worse mental health in the year or two prior to the pandemic than during it, but that is simply because my depression, abuse, and other personal issues all peaked about 4-5 months prior to the pandemic. My parents kicked me out for a month less than 2 months before the pandemic, but only kicked me out for a day at a time on a few occasions over quarantine. I ended up using the quarantine to do some soul-searching and figure shit out, but much of it has been fucking hell for me. I've had many depressive episodes throughout the pandemic and felt incredibly lonely at times. There have been a couple moments where I thought that I was going to kill myself, only to be talked down by a friend or myself. I'm glad to have gotten through everything and I'm a lot better now, but it would be a lie to say that quarantine was at all easy for me.
Scientific Evidence:
In the US, depression has increased in adults from 8.5% before the pandemic to 27.8% a few months into the pandemic to 32.8% in 2021. That is 1 in 3 adults experiencing depression. Anxiety increased from 8.1% of US adults in 2019 to 21.4% in early April 2020 and remained at 11-11.5% from May 2020 to December 2020. In the UK, 21% of adults experienced depression in early 2021 and 17% experienced depression in summer 2021 vs. 9.5-10% in 2019. 74% of depressed adults attributed worsening well-being to the coronavirus pandemic.
We are experiencing an unprecedented increase in depression that is hitting the most vulnerable - low-income people, unemployed people, disabled people, unmarried adults, people experiencing "pandemic-related stressors" such as financial struggles and job loss - harder than anyone. Whether you think it's a case of Major Depressive Disorder or "Shitty Life Syndrome", people are not doing well. Read the numbers, and let that sink in. 1 in 3 adults. If you take 3 adults in the USA off the street, odds are one of them is suffering from depression. That is fucking insane. The fact that people are not talking about this more is ridiculous.
Suicide rates continued to decrease overall in 2020 (like in 2019), but significantly increased among people of color and young people (particularly young men.) Suicides in boys 10-14 increased 13%, and both Black people 15-34 and Hispanic people ages 25-34 also saw double-digit increases. I believe that these statistics do not include drug overdoses. The focus here should not be on the decrease (which can possibly be explained by communities "banding together", people feeling that their lives will improve with the end of the pandemic, people intentionally overdosing instead of using other methods of suicide, people feeling that they have to continue to provide for their family during a pandemic, etc.) but the fact that vulnerable groups such as children, teenagers, and people of color are committing suicide at such alarming rates. In 2020, Illinois saw an 8.6% decrease in suicides overall but a 27.7% increase in black suicides. In Maryland, suicides among black people doubled compared to the previous 3 years during the 2 months that public spaces were completely closed.
Suicides are also killing significantly more children, teenagers, and young adults aged 10-24 in the USA than Covid-19 is. Whether or not many of these children would have committed suicide with or without the pandemic is debatable and not the point here. The fact that suicide is killing this many young people regardless is something we should all be incredibly alarmed by. Every year, thousands of people feel enough pain, loneliness, and hopelessness that they believe that it would be less painful to kill themselves than to continue living their current lives. That is the issue here.
While statistics on it are sparse, both science and common sense indicates that children are experiencing significantly more abuse as a result of the pandemic. Add up increased stress on parents and both the parent and the child(ren) being at home far more, and it's pretty easy to figure out that more adults are probably taking out their anger on their children and doing so more often. Unfortunately, the same can be said for intimate partner violence. And these are not rare issues. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men experience and report domestic abuse at the hands of a partner. And that is just the ones who report it. 10% of children report experiencing sexual abuse. The number for girls is 20%, or 1 in 5. And almost 75% of children ages 2-4 experience physical and/or psychological violence/"punishment." Physical abuse itself is quite hard to quantify, as the definition excludes a lot of "discipline" proven to be psychologically harmful but not particularly physically damaging such as spanking, and because it is both extremely underreported, and (from experience) most child abuse is not taken very seriously or at all easy to report. I struggled to get it taken seriously as a teenager, let alone as a kid. When I was 9, I flat out told a child services worker that my dad was hitting me after someone called child services on my parents because my mom admitted to slamming my head into a staircase at a parent group. They apparently sent a worker to our home who checked if there was food in the fridge and then left. I assume I wasn't present because I can't even remember it. So if you want to quantify these issues, think about how many people you know who have told you that they have or have not experienced any form of physical/emotional/sexual abuse or neglect as a kid. Because as much as they should be rare issues, they are horrifyingly common.
Finally, here are the USA's Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts: (USA National Center for Health Statistics)
The already massively prevalent opioid epidemic saw an 18% increase in overdoses over 2019 in the first 3 months of the pandemic alone. As you can see in the graphs in the link above, predicted 12-month-ending drug overdose deaths have increased 35% and reported deaths have increased 33% from February 2020 (March 2019 - February 2020) to May 2021 (June 2020 - May 2021). We are now seeing an all-time-high of about 100,000 deaths per year. The bulk of these (75% involved opioids, and 28% involved "Psychostimulants with abuse potential." Overdoses are at an all time high while the DEA pressures pharmacies out of handing out naloxone.
Conclusion v. Ending Message:
These are not just statistics, but hundreds of thousands of individual people who have died mostly preventable deaths. People many of us may have known. Some of our very own here on Bluelight are counted in those statistics. That saddens me. That makes me want to do something, whether it's being here on Bluelight supporting people or volunteering to hand out narcan kits. I'm not really sure what else I can do, but I want to help.
We should not be losing people like this. I read through old posts and poems by people like Captain Heroin and wish that I had the opportunity to know them, that they were still around today. So many people are dying and it feels like there's not much I can do about it at times. But we need to at least reach out to people. In our local communities and our online communities. Our families and our friends. Even complete strangers. Just being there for one person may be one live you've saved. Don't underestimate the impact that you can have, by yourself or especially when we work together to fight issues like this.
I've spent over 4-5 hours writing and rewriting this thread since this morning, going through statistics that are ultimately just attempts to simplify the situation into numbers. Because this is a massive problem and I want to start the discussion properly. This doesn't just affect all of us at Bluelight, but everyone as humans. Almost everyone is directly or heavily indirectly affected by suicide, mental health struggles, addiction, and trauma. And hundreds of thousands of people are dying because of these issues. Maybe even millions. And hundreds of millions of people are suffering. All amounts more than our brains can even fathom. And we need to change that.
TW: Suicide, trauma, depression, addiction, etc.
I found out last night that two men who had a mild amount of influence on me in my childhood both committed suicide in the past several months. One was a talented local magician who frequently performed at events at my elementary school. The other was a director at a summer camp that I went to for a few years. Both were talented, brilliant, inspirational men who brightened every room they entered. Who will never have the opportunity to do that again outside of photos and memories and old video camera footage.
It's gotten me thinking about the effect that quarantine has had on addiction, mental health, suicide, and trauma. How many lives we have lost not just from the virus itself, but from people being stuck inside as a result of it.
I want this thread to be a place where people can discuss the effect that quarantine has had on the mental health and drug use of themselves and their loved ones, share their stories, and get some support while they face these struggles. I know that we already have the 2021 Suicide Support Thread, but I believe that this issue is different enough to warrant its own thread.
I'm going to first share some personal anecdotes about myself and people I know, and then end the post with some scientific data showing that this phenomenon is not just anecdotal and is in fact a massive epidemic.
I want everyone who is reading this and struggling with mental health, trauma, addiction, suicidal thoughts, the loss of someone close to you, or anything else to know that you are not alone in your suffering, and that we are here for you.
Anecdotal Evidence:
Numerous people close to me have suffered from worsening depression and addiction throughout the past two years. I know people who previously had zero issues with mental illness and developed depression in 2020. I've also seen many Bluelighters deal with relapses, addiction, and worsening mental health as a result of the pandemic. I have many friends who were stuck living with emotional/physical/sexual abusers due to the pandemic. I know others who were kicked out and unable to/had extreme difficulty finding places to stay due to the combination of increased need for public services and decreased shelter capacity due to pandemic restrictions. I'll share a few specific cases of very close friends struggling with addiction and mental health, but I will attempt to protect the privacy of everyone involved:
One of my best friends lives with his emotionally manipulative/abusive parents and as a result he developed both a weed addiction (cannabis often gave him mild psychosis and he became psychologically dependent on it) and a short Xanax addiction at the start of the pandemic. He has since been over a year clean from both after spending almost a year at one of those 'troubled-teen' facilities. After reading the Joe vs. Elan comics, from what he told me it seems like he was lucky enough to end up at a facility less harmful and extreme than most.
My other best friend seems to be currently developing a DXM addiction. He used cannabis quite heavily throughout the pandemic, though in his case he was mostly using medical marijuana with decent CBD levels and it seemed to have treated many of his mental health issues without much negative effect.
A very close friend of mine has also dealt with worsening addictions to weed (made him a lot duller mentally, significantly worsened his depression and other mental health issues) and alcohol as well as numerous benzo binges. He is on his 2nd attempt at quitting weed and just hit a month clean. He chilled out with the alcohol (now he drinks but doesn't get blackout drunk every time like he used to) and plans to quit both alcohol and benzos starting January 1st.
A few people I considered close friends two years ago became addicted to meth, destroyed their lives and relationships, and most of them either got kicked out by their parents or left and became homeless. While in all honestly most of them were already pretty horrible people, it's still pretty sad to see people destroy their lives; Especially before they even turn 18 (Said people were 1-2 years younger than me.)
I personally did not develop any addiction (although I did use a lot of DXM in summer 2020), but living with my abusers full-time and having little face-to-face interaction with anyone outside of my immediate family certainly took a toll on my mental health. I honestly had worse mental health in the year or two prior to the pandemic than during it, but that is simply because my depression, abuse, and other personal issues all peaked about 4-5 months prior to the pandemic. My parents kicked me out for a month less than 2 months before the pandemic, but only kicked me out for a day at a time on a few occasions over quarantine. I ended up using the quarantine to do some soul-searching and figure shit out, but much of it has been fucking hell for me. I've had many depressive episodes throughout the pandemic and felt incredibly lonely at times. There have been a couple moments where I thought that I was going to kill myself, only to be talked down by a friend or myself. I'm glad to have gotten through everything and I'm a lot better now, but it would be a lie to say that quarantine was at all easy for me.
Scientific Evidence:
In the US, depression has increased in adults from 8.5% before the pandemic to 27.8% a few months into the pandemic to 32.8% in 2021. That is 1 in 3 adults experiencing depression. Anxiety increased from 8.1% of US adults in 2019 to 21.4% in early April 2020 and remained at 11-11.5% from May 2020 to December 2020. In the UK, 21% of adults experienced depression in early 2021 and 17% experienced depression in summer 2021 vs. 9.5-10% in 2019. 74% of depressed adults attributed worsening well-being to the coronavirus pandemic.
We are experiencing an unprecedented increase in depression that is hitting the most vulnerable - low-income people, unemployed people, disabled people, unmarried adults, people experiencing "pandemic-related stressors" such as financial struggles and job loss - harder than anyone. Whether you think it's a case of Major Depressive Disorder or "Shitty Life Syndrome", people are not doing well. Read the numbers, and let that sink in. 1 in 3 adults. If you take 3 adults in the USA off the street, odds are one of them is suffering from depression. That is fucking insane. The fact that people are not talking about this more is ridiculous.
Suicide rates continued to decrease overall in 2020 (like in 2019), but significantly increased among people of color and young people (particularly young men.) Suicides in boys 10-14 increased 13%, and both Black people 15-34 and Hispanic people ages 25-34 also saw double-digit increases. I believe that these statistics do not include drug overdoses. The focus here should not be on the decrease (which can possibly be explained by communities "banding together", people feeling that their lives will improve with the end of the pandemic, people intentionally overdosing instead of using other methods of suicide, people feeling that they have to continue to provide for their family during a pandemic, etc.) but the fact that vulnerable groups such as children, teenagers, and people of color are committing suicide at such alarming rates. In 2020, Illinois saw an 8.6% decrease in suicides overall but a 27.7% increase in black suicides. In Maryland, suicides among black people doubled compared to the previous 3 years during the 2 months that public spaces were completely closed.
Suicides are also killing significantly more children, teenagers, and young adults aged 10-24 in the USA than Covid-19 is. Whether or not many of these children would have committed suicide with or without the pandemic is debatable and not the point here. The fact that suicide is killing this many young people regardless is something we should all be incredibly alarmed by. Every year, thousands of people feel enough pain, loneliness, and hopelessness that they believe that it would be less painful to kill themselves than to continue living their current lives. That is the issue here.
While statistics on it are sparse, both science and common sense indicates that children are experiencing significantly more abuse as a result of the pandemic. Add up increased stress on parents and both the parent and the child(ren) being at home far more, and it's pretty easy to figure out that more adults are probably taking out their anger on their children and doing so more often. Unfortunately, the same can be said for intimate partner violence. And these are not rare issues. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men experience and report domestic abuse at the hands of a partner. And that is just the ones who report it. 10% of children report experiencing sexual abuse. The number for girls is 20%, or 1 in 5. And almost 75% of children ages 2-4 experience physical and/or psychological violence/"punishment." Physical abuse itself is quite hard to quantify, as the definition excludes a lot of "discipline" proven to be psychologically harmful but not particularly physically damaging such as spanking, and because it is both extremely underreported, and (from experience) most child abuse is not taken very seriously or at all easy to report. I struggled to get it taken seriously as a teenager, let alone as a kid. When I was 9, I flat out told a child services worker that my dad was hitting me after someone called child services on my parents because my mom admitted to slamming my head into a staircase at a parent group. They apparently sent a worker to our home who checked if there was food in the fridge and then left. I assume I wasn't present because I can't even remember it. So if you want to quantify these issues, think about how many people you know who have told you that they have or have not experienced any form of physical/emotional/sexual abuse or neglect as a kid. Because as much as they should be rare issues, they are horrifyingly common.
Finally, here are the USA's Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts: (USA National Center for Health Statistics)
The already massively prevalent opioid epidemic saw an 18% increase in overdoses over 2019 in the first 3 months of the pandemic alone. As you can see in the graphs in the link above, predicted 12-month-ending drug overdose deaths have increased 35% and reported deaths have increased 33% from February 2020 (March 2019 - February 2020) to May 2021 (June 2020 - May 2021). We are now seeing an all-time-high of about 100,000 deaths per year. The bulk of these (75% involved opioids, and 28% involved "Psychostimulants with abuse potential." Overdoses are at an all time high while the DEA pressures pharmacies out of handing out naloxone.
Conclusion v. Ending Message:
These are not just statistics, but hundreds of thousands of individual people who have died mostly preventable deaths. People many of us may have known. Some of our very own here on Bluelight are counted in those statistics. That saddens me. That makes me want to do something, whether it's being here on Bluelight supporting people or volunteering to hand out narcan kits. I'm not really sure what else I can do, but I want to help.
We should not be losing people like this. I read through old posts and poems by people like Captain Heroin and wish that I had the opportunity to know them, that they were still around today. So many people are dying and it feels like there's not much I can do about it at times. But we need to at least reach out to people. In our local communities and our online communities. Our families and our friends. Even complete strangers. Just being there for one person may be one live you've saved. Don't underestimate the impact that you can have, by yourself or especially when we work together to fight issues like this.
I've spent over 4-5 hours writing and rewriting this thread since this morning, going through statistics that are ultimately just attempts to simplify the situation into numbers. Because this is a massive problem and I want to start the discussion properly. This doesn't just affect all of us at Bluelight, but everyone as humans. Almost everyone is directly or heavily indirectly affected by suicide, mental health struggles, addiction, and trauma. And hundreds of thousands of people are dying because of these issues. Maybe even millions. And hundreds of millions of people are suffering. All amounts more than our brains can even fathom. And we need to change that.
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