Psychology Experts on the Anxiety of the Lifting COVID Restrictions
"Just as the pandemic experience differed for different people, emerging from it won't be the same for everyone", reads the subheader of a recent Montreal Gazette article that had psychology experts weighing in on the uneasiness felt by the general public, resulting from Quebec's abrupt lifting of COVID health and safety protocols. McGill Educational and Counselling Psychology's Tina Montreuil was a featured commentator for the story.
When the pandemic was declared, “there was an understanding by employers as we moved to working remotely that our worlds were changing,” said clinical psychologist Tina Montreuil, an associate professor in McGill’s department of educational and counselling psychology. “Now there seems to be an expectation that, because we are going back to what we knew, it should be easier.” But any transition is an adjustment “and we need the same support we had at the beginning of the pandemic.”
If you start looking at risk rather than acceptable risk, you won’t do anything at all, Montreuil said. “We need to accept a certain level of risk — and that needs to be a personal decision.”