Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

The Disastrous Estrogen-Replacement Saga's Cautionary Research Lesson: "How easy it is to be misled in medicine by correlational and retrospective studies, and how when it comes to proving the merit of any drug or procedure, nothing short of a large, controlled, double-blind clinical trial will do." In Natalie Anger's, Woman - An Intimate Geography

Emergency Room workers are being swamped by medically healthy people who are frantically seeking testing for coronavirus. Though the present national period time is exceptional, their behavior is no different from anytime when anxiety escalates and panic overwhelms.

Anxiety is the normal, healthy experience when the mind senses danger. It can produce symptoms that mimic virtually any medical disorder: pain in the head or back; nausea or dry mouth; scarily heightened blood pressure; skin eruption; lack of appetite. All instantly vanishing when the fear that aroused them disappears. During normal times, forty to sixty percent of the people arriving at an Emergency Room who fear that they're having a heart attack are really suffering a Panic Disorder. This is the condition when the normal symptoms of anxiety are misinterpreted as a deadly medical event.

More public education about the human mind is sorely needed.

I told the following to an Irish person: As frightening as things are, they're about to get much worse. A high-level government contact told me that several thousand space ships containing carnivorous alien creatures are speeding from Venus headed for Earth, having exhausted their planet's food supply. NSA communication decrypts revealed that their favored food is IRISH STEW.

The present extreme public anxiety caused by the coronavirus may reflect its difference from past national crises. Those, like in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack and President Kennedy's assassination, were better capable of being grasped, being more "conventional" and having a presumed brief time frame to experience whereas the present crisis may be experienced more like that of the seemingly endless and inexplicable Great Depression.

There are few more painful experiences than an agitated depression: the combination of pervading anxiety and deep depression. Which can result following such common trauma as divorce or unemployment. Or even apparently nothing since, as I never tire of saying, the unconscious is very powerful and one must respect its power.

Because feelings reflect both mind and body, they cannot be separated. Thus does remaining in bed make depression worse and incoherent flight increase panic. So when altering the body through constructive activity, as by involving oneself in a work or household chore, the agitated depression lifts and, sometime later, its unconscious cause (if one exists) may surface.