America Tests Positive For A Raging Mental Health Pandemic

I&I Editorial

While public officials are busy cracking down on freedom using a viral pandemic as their justification, another pandemic comes chopping and reaping, this one caused by the extreme measures that have produced no beneficial results. Both the elected and unelected who have brought this on need to be held accountable.

“Americans’ Mental Health Ratings Sink to New Low,” says the headline of a report from a recent Gallup poll.

“Americans’ latest assessment of their mental health is worse than it has been at any point in the last two decades. Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults rate their mental health positively,” that is, “excellent/good,” while 85% did in 2019. Those who said their mental health or emotional well-being is “excellent” fell from 43% to 34%.

The poll was conducted between Nov. 5 and Nov. 19, before, we must point out, before holiday-spoiling lockdowns were ramped up in much of the country.

In what we would classify as almost an understatement, Gallup said the decline in mental health is “undoubtedly influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to profoundly disrupt people’s lives.” Yes, it might “also reflect views of the election and the state of race relations.” But we’ve had elections – just four years ago the political left fell into a deep funk over the results – and race relation troubles before. Never have we had our liberties sacked as they have been since March.

Thanks to power-mad, narcissistic, risk-averse, cowardly me-too public officials, America and other nations under lockdowns are suffering emotionally.

We know from the Centers for Disease Control that a quarter of young adults from 18 to 24 say they have contemplated ending their lives because of the pandemic.

That university students are “at significant risk for mental health effects” from lockdowns 

That just within the first weeks of lockdowns “47% of those sheltering-in-place reported negative mental health effects resulting from worry or stress related to coronavirus” while only 37% of those who were not sheltering-in-place reported “negative mental health impacts from coronavirus.”

That a team of researchers looking at how government restrictions impact mental health found “a significant negative effect is an expected consequence of the various lockdowns that governments have implemented around the world.”

Here we add that after the Gallup organization had broken down responses by demographic groups, it found one group, and one only, in which a larger portion of its members – rising from 42% in 2019 to 46% – said their mental health was excellent: those who attend religious services on a weekly basis.

It’s arguable that no other group has suffered more discriminatory treatment by the lockdown zealots than the religious. It took a Supreme Court ruling last week to restore religious freedom in California, where the governor had taken it away with an edict as if he were the Almighty. It’s likely that further judicial interventions will be needed to protect Americans’ right to engage in faith-based assemblies.

Despite clear evidence that lockdowns are a silent mental health killer, our superiors continue to shackle our liberty. They’re robbing people of their livelihoods, their instinct to gather, their deep need worship together, their emotional outlets, their very humanity. Shut-it-down officials are the worst among us, the last people who should be making decisions about others’ lives. Make them pay in every election going forward until each one of them is replaced by a lawmaker who respects our God-given freedom.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board