Dealing with Corona: Between Panic and Reason
Hoarding purchases, school closures, fear of even taking a step out in public: Panic has set in among many people that they could contract the corona virus. What is now added to this is the fear of the economic consequences and the question of how to deal with concrete everyday challenges.
This does not mean that it is a panic disorder in the clinical sense, explains Prof. Dr. Nadia Sosnowsky-Waschek from the SRH University of Applied Sciences Heidelberg. In the interview, the psychologist describes how to explain the burgeoning sense of threat and what you can do about it.
Where does this sense of threat to our health come from?
Every time we go shopping, we assess the risk of getting fat and damaging our health by eating chips. When driving, we decide in a matter of seconds whether we will make it through the yellow traffic light. How the decision turns out depends on various factors. One is how serious we consider the consequences of this decision to be for our health and how likely it is that we will have to bear these consequences ourselves. Does the pack of chips cause Diabetes and does this shorten the personal lifespan? For many everyday decisions, the personal health risk tends to be considered low. So we drive over yellow and put the chips in the shopping cart. Such risk assessments are commonplace, at the same time highly efficient and very energy-saving for the brain, because in many cases they make our lives easier. The evaluation often runs unconsciously, quasi-automatically.
What is different about coronavirus evaluation?
In the case of the Coronavirus we cannot fall back on proven everyday routines. We are dealing with the assessment of an event that is new, rare compared to many other life risks, and whose potential health consequences we cannot assess for ourselves, our families, and the economy. The risk posed by such rare and new events is typically overestimated, whereas it tends to be underestimated for risks that occur much more frequently but are known.
What else influences risk perception?
It is also relevant how to control a Infection assesses. Can you protect yourself effectively by disinfecting your hands or using a mask? Does an infection depend at all on my own behavior or that of other people, or simply on chance? Due to ever new information from the media, reported incidents or bans, many people have the impression that the risk of infection and its consequences are less controllable. Considering the involuntary nature of exposure to the virus, the danger is also perceived to be greater. Fear of an airplane crash can be avoided by avoiding airplane travel. But is the one meter distance to other people enough to contain one's own risk?
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