[eric_b]

Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that way. I mean, we put people in prison as punishment because it sucks. I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are clamoring for more lockdowns and reduced freedoms. It's like Stockholm syndrome writ large. There is so much fear being peddled by the media and others that people have lost all perspective.

[UncleOxidant]

Calling what we did in most of the US a "lockdown" seems like a misnomer. Wuhan did an actual lockdown where people sometimes had their apartment door welded shut and police were arresting people who went outside - that's a lockdown. In the US it was more of a shelter-in-place order. Now that we know more about how the virus spreads we can make those more targeted - forbidding people from going outside at all, for example, just doesn't make any sense with what we know about transmission. Mask-wearing also has helped. Outside seating (with proper distancing) at restaurants seems pretty safe - though come winter this will be less of an option.

As for the "lockdown" and mental health, I have to agree with the article's findings. Myself and a lot of folks I've talked to have liked certain aspects of it - more sleep, less frenetic activity for activity sake, a slower pace. It seemed like the world was getting a long-deserved rest.

[vorpalhex]

> though come winter this will be less of an option

Or we'll see a lot of investment in patio propane heaters.

[zaroth]

This is No true Scotsman applied to “lockdowns”. Semantics aside, there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment, while it’s also inarguably true that other personality types find it highly detrimental.

I doubt the answer can be found in anecdotes, nor will the true impact be fully felt or known for some time.

However claiming that wellbeing levels improved seems to me to be extremely misleading. The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true. The secondary (non-COVID) public health impacts will ultimately be measured in millions of lives lost, due to mis-prioritizing COVID above all else.

[UncleOxidant]

> The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true

However, a lot of those unemployed service workers were making more money on unemployment than they did in their previous jobs. Add in the $1200 check and that certainly helped in that April-July period.

> there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment

Yes, for sure. Introvert here. Loved it. I guess that means I could have had a successful career in lighthouse keeping in a former age.

[zaroth]

The unemployment benefits go away faster than the jobs come back. And in the meantime the States go bankrupt and Federal debt balloons on the order of $10 trillion.

A wonder if a lot of people argue for lockdowns not just because they think it might be a worthy socioeconomic trade-off, but because they actually enjoy life better that way and aren’t personally being devastated by it. Similarly, people against lockdown could have just not been personally effected by COVID, or know anyone who has been.

Humans are particularly bad at balancing very large impact events (we tend to underestimate the big stuff and overestimate the small). I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.

[UncleOxidant]

> The unemployment benefits go away faster than the jobs come back

Sure, but it looks like the Democratic House and even the President want them to continue at least till year end.

> I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.

As an epidemiologist said months back (paraphrasing): "success in dealing with a pandemic will always be seen as having been an over-reaction after the fact."

[mistermann]

The problem with counterfactuals is, it very well may have been an overreaction. The truth is often not knowable.

If the above is the logic someone is using to sell me on an idea, my suspicion level increases.

[vict00ms]

I don't believe this is a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy: the person was replying to someone claiming lockdowns were equivalent to incarceration, but the US-style "lockdown" was much, much less severe than that.

[the_gastropod]

> We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die

I find this sentiment as funny as I do frustrating. This thing has been around ~8 months. We know some about this virus. We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects. And we're continuously finding troubling signs about it. It's looking like even mild cases can result in long-term brain, heart, and lung damage [1].

The US has handled this absolutely horribly. Our "lock down" was so mild, even in NYC, so as to be the tiniest of inconveniences, hardly the prison sentence you imply. And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it, and ultimately just extend the time we have to live this way. If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...

[clairity]

> "We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects."

news media likes to harp on this now that the initial novelty has worn off, with stories about extreme cases of serious complications to keep the fear train going and the ad bucks rolling in.

but bodies are complex. every ailment has a long tail of odd residuals. in fact, just living has a long tail of odd residuals. there's little evidence so far that this ailment has any special long-term effect.

[the_gastropod]

We all know news outlets profit from fear, outrage, and general negative emotions. We get it. But that doesn't mean you get to just chalk up any bad news as "Well, that's just the media for you!".

If you didn't find the article I posted above compelling, I'd love to hear why. Here's another [1] BBC article suggesting approximately 50% of covid cases result in brain damage. Why should we not take this seriously?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-ef...

[vorpalhex]

> If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today.

That's a line I hear repeated but it doesn't seem to align to reality. Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]. Likewise some areas that had very loose restrictions initially.. never had it that bad.

The reality is that the lockdowns and shelter in place orders did very little, and factors such as airports and borders are much stronger indicators of whether we'll see more virus spread. Masks, including homemade masks, do seem to be very effective and pushing people to use them seems to make meaningful differences - but it's not by itself sufficient (at least not homemade masks).

> And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it,

Part of freedom means the freedom to disagree. Sure, you can disagree with them as well and they may be entirely wrong - and that's still OK. That isn't a failure of freedom, it's a success story and I'd much rather have some idiots shouting loudly than black bag them by secret police or have "Winnie the Pooh" start getting censored in private messages.

[^1]: They're past the worst of their resurgence from the current looks, but https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/hong-kong-sees-fewest-... has a nice graph showing their second spike

[^2]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/08/04/national/japan-...

[the_gastropod]

> Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]

Japan has had ~1,000 covid deaths. And Hong Kong has had something like 25 deaths. The US is about to hit 170,000.

> Part of freedom means the freedom to disagree. Sure, you can disagree with them as well and they may be entirely wrong - and that's still OK. That isn't a failure of freedom, it's a success story and I'd much rather have some idiots shouting loudly than black bag them by secret police or have "Winnie the Pooh" start getting censored in private messages.

There's a middle between these poles you've created. This is the ol' libertarian dilemma: when one person's freedom encroaches on another. People's "freedom" to not wear a mask encroaches on my freedom to not get sick. Freedom requires some modicum of social responsibility. Without it, freedom can't exist.

[xapata]

Yeah, lockdowns could probably have been avoided in most of the world if decent surgical masks had been shipped to each citizen, and they complied with wearing them.

[clairity]

the principle mitigation is distancing. lockdowns are wholly unnecessary if distancing adequately, because they add no marginal benefit on top of distancing (ignoring the obvious political dimension of benefits).

also, use a mask when distancing (indoors with strangers) isn't possible, but understand that masks are inferior to distancing for a host of reasons, including the non-transivity of controlled tests to the wider world and its astonishing variety. masks also add little marginal benefit on top of distancing for most folks, particularly if not meticulously adhering to a long list of proper usage rules.

distance, it does a body good (in these covid times).

[xapata]

Because of the potential aerosol transmission, I'd say we should wear masks when indoors regardless of whether anyone is nearby in the moment. People may occupy the same area later.

[qubex]

> lockdowns are terrible for human mental health

That’s exactly what this study is disproving.

At the very least, this data is showing something that is well-known in behavioural circles: that once the threshold of a radical change is overcome, people begin to habituate to it and regress towards the mean.

> we put people in prison as punishment

Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison. Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.

[refurb]

The data looks like crap? They used search terms (!) and then had to estimate some data because they didn’t start collecting until after Covid hit.

Unfortunately, overall life satisfaction questions were only introduced into the mood tracker in April 2020. So, to consider how the pandemic and lockdown affected people’s general wellbeing, we had to attribute scores to respondents for the period prior to April based on their mood data (we calculated the scores using a statistical technique called regression).

[qubex]

The data may look like crap (to you) but it’s better than absolutist remarks and anecdotal allusions... and as this thread so aptly shows, there’s been a range of reactions, some even favourable.

[isoskeles]

There are absolutist remarks because people know whether or not their own well-being has improved, much better than a study that attempts to declare what their reality is. More than ever, I’m suspicious that social scientists might have an agenda. And their methods are, as usual, not even close to physical sciences.

[bitbuilder]

>Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison.

You seem to be forgetting about the sizable percentage of the population that lives alone in their small dwelling. I know a lot of these people and my own anecdata indicates a lot of them are having mental health issues.

>Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.

Well sure, but I think it would be hard to argue that confinement and the resulting lack of mobility isn't the primary role of a prison.

And even in prison, we let prisoners eat with friends, play sports with friends, work with their friends, visit with family, etc. These are all things most of us felt we couldn't do during the height of lockdown.

And why do we allow prisoners to do all those things? Because we recognize that it's inhumane to deprive people of social interaction for extended periods of time.

To further reinforce this, what do we do when someone's in prison, and we want to punish them more? We decrease their mobility and increase their isolation by putting them in a small room by themselves.

Please note, I'm not arguing that lockdown was the wrong move, or that we shouldn't continue to consider various lockdown measures.

I am saying that we shouldn't be dismissive of concerns about the toll long term isolation is having on people's mental health. And that consideration of various lockdown measures should be taking into account these mental health concerns and weighing them against public health concerns.

[qubex]

I appreciate your nuanced reply, and I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your observations. I am not propounding the view that lockdowns are or would be beneficial, nor even dismissing claims that they might be mentally challenging. I’m just rankled by the dismissive tone of OP and maybe I’ve become hypersensitive to some of the crazy conspiracy-theory-level stuff that’s been going around.

I’m from Italy, though I was in Malta during the time of the latter’s lockdown, so I had it easy while also being intimately exposed to the consequences of one of the West’s harshest and earliest clampdowns. It’s not an experience I would wish on anybody and it’s something I really really hope won’t happen again.

But by analogy to another famously exponential process, when the neutron flux gets frisky you have to damn the consequences to the the power grid and scram in the control rods into the reactor while you still have time to do so. People will suffer mentally, but at least they shall mostly live to tell the tale...

I have not forgotten that house arrest exists and that it is a form of punishment. Restricting mobility most definitely is literally restrictive and the trade-off of public health and rights & freedoms should not be taken lightly. Governments literally ‘grounded’ their citizenry for months on end. It’s not quite as unprecedented as we think (the same policy was widely used during the Spanish Flu pandemic, once it was publicly admitted to be an issue after the War ended).

[jimmaswell]

The rebound didn't go all the way back up to how it was before.

[qubex]

Considering the attendant economic devastation and ongoing uncertainty about the health situation, would you expect it to?

Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.

[jimmaswell]

People were at least heavily implying average sentiment went back to normal due to hedonic adaptation.

[JoshuaDavid]

> Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison

There's literally a punishment called "house arrest".

[qubex]

Yeah, and it’s very mild compared to prison, and quite literally isn’t the same thing (which is why they have different names).

[cirgue]

I am 100% ok grunting through a lockdown if it shortens the duration of this awful fucking pandemic. The current soft restrictions with no clear endgame is 1000 times more shitty than having to hole up in your apartment knowing that it will end all the other restrictions sooner.

[zaroth]

What if the lockdowns just lengthen the duration of the pandemic and the ultimate endpoints are nearly identical?

Some amount of lengthening is essential to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, of course. In many lockdown environments, the target case numbers are much lower than necessary for that goal, if not zero.

[cookingrobot]

That would be true if there was no vaccine coming and everyone was going to get it eventually. But if we expect a vaccine sometime in the next year or so, we can try to minimize the number of cases and deaths until then. So far about 1.5% of the US has tested positive for it, so maybe 2-10% have been exposed. If we can keep that under 20%, that will be a lot fewer deaths than if we let it run free to herd immunity levels at 95%.

[UncleOxidant]

Exactly. And given that many who have had covid-19 have permanent damage and/or longterm ongoing symptoms it's best to try to minimize the number of people who get it before a vaccine becomes available. A significant number of people with longterm disability caused by covid-19 would also damage the economy.

[tdfx]

I've heard this many times but I don't understand the thinking behind it. How could a lockdown shorten the duration of a pandemic? AFAIK there's only three ways a pandemic ends:

(1) eradication: we control the spread so effectively through testing, tracing, and isolation that no more new people are infected

(2) herd immunity: enough people get infected that the potential pool of new hosts causes the transmission rate to decline

(3) inoculation: we find a vaccine with high effectiveness and somehow deliver that widely enough to create the herd immunity situation

It seems lockdown can only help with #1 and I'd say the horses have already left the barn on that one. The only things lockdowns can do at this point are to prevent number of acute cases from overwhelming the hospital system.

I'm not against lockdowns in extraordinary public health emergencies, but let's not pretend they are getting us any closer to a finish line.

[the_gastropod]

Option 1 is the ideal case, yes. And New Zealand pulled it off (unfortunately, it was undone when a covid patient re-entered the country). But it's not the only benefit. Reducing the number of cases obviously reduces the risk of the disease spreading.

The idea is to seriously lock down / wear masks, etc. for ~6 weeks to get to a point where the case-load is so small that it's manageable with little effort (not back to 100% normal). Instead, the U.S. strategy has been to put in medium effort / inconvenience indefinitely.

[SpicyLemonZest]

New Zealand officials don't currently believe that their new outbreak was caused by a patient re-entering the country - they haven't found any link between the detected cases and overseas returnees.

No country I'm aware of believes that even the smallest outbreaks can be handled with little effort. Health officials across the globe have been consistently saying that the coronavirus will spread unless people stay very far from normal.

[zaroth]

New Zealand is the perfect example. They have zero immunity, therefore they have to stay absolutely quarantined from the rest of the world indefinitely.

If a vaccine is only partially effective, and their tolerance for cases is literally lockdown at the first case, then they will never re-open.

[xapata]

> vaccine is only partially effective

Different vaccines will have different efficacy. None will be perfect.

[qubex]

A metaphor, if I may: think by analogy to the other famously exponential process, nuclear fission. When neutron flux gets too frisky, you have to throttle the reaction or face a catastrophe. You don’t need to disassemble the reactor to shut it down, it suffices to slam in the control rods and mop up those neutrons so they don’t trigger further fissions. Social Distancing is the “explosive dissassembly” of epidemiology: if the nuclei get too far apart (because the reactor has detonated) the reaction ceases because most neutrons “go wide” and don’t hit another nucleus. We’ve had to rely on the latter because as of yet we don’t have suitably effective control rods to scram the core. Lockdown is all about keeping the fuel elements sufficiently far apart so that the reaction goes sub-critical and eventually peters out (or reaches some background level).

(“Argument by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious”, so make of my words what you may.)

[tdfx]

Sure, I've actually used that analogy before myself, so I can't judge your use of it :)

My point was that in this case, people are expecting lockdown to stop the reaction entirely, when in fact the control rods are only intended to slow it down. The post I replied to seemed to believe that lockdown was intended to shorten the duration of the pandemic, when in fact it has the opposite effect (for the purpose of getting good side effects like keeping ICU beds available).

[xapata]

Right, but the lockdown helps us choose exit door 3 (inoculation) instead of 2 (herd immunity).

[partyboat1586]

Providing we can stay locked down until the vaccine is ready.

[ouid]

>We're not meant to live that way

I'm not sure what you think this means. Are you arguing that we're "meant to live" by commuting to work and gathering in cafes and restaurants?

Humans are extraordinarily adaptive. We live anywhere that food can be grown, and oxygen is readily available. We aren't "meant" to do anything. All you are announcing is that you, personally, don't like to adapt.

[yibg]

Speak for yourself, I've been happier during our "lockdown", which wasn't actually a lockdown. My mental health certainly isn't hurt because of it.

What staggers me is that huge groups of people see countries that didn't take this seriously vs countries that did, and the difference in deaths, and yet still don't want to take this seriously.

[SubiculumCode]

Working from home with my family around and no commute; I was meant to live this way.

But if they were not here? Being alone all the time sucks

[chaostheory]

Yeah, let's throw out all the data just because it disagrees with our personal beliefs

[partyboat1586]

If I do a sum and it comes out as something I don't expect I let my intuition guide me to check the sum to ensure no mistakes were made, I don't just accept the answer.

[chaostheory]

I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is when data is disregarded without any analysis just because it doesn't match arbitrary expectations.

[partyboat1586]

Fair enough

[mc32]

I agree that lockdowns & SIPs are terrible. It’s why people dislike being grounded at home or like you said serving a sentence at home, etc.

Of course there are things we have to weigh, physical health threat vs mental health pressures and national security, etc.

But you are absolutely right that the media want to paint narratives. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not so much collusion but rather it’s their nature to do that. So both on the left or right we get narratives. They feel obliged to herd people one way or another. It’s like they’re on a mission to getting people to not think for themselves. That’s the main objective.

[fragmede]

With the rise of Craigslist and the Internet, mainstream media is more reliant than ever on advertising. If there's a cute story about someone being nice, well, that's cute but boring. But if there's someone being horrible, gosh, I'm going to rush to go over and stare at the car crash, judge them for being horrible, be angry that they're horrible, feel smug about the fact that I'm not horrible. Possibly go on some sort of screed about "those people". All the meanwhile, I'm watching the advertisement because I really have to see whatever the thing is right after that.

"The media", in so far as it's a monolithic group (it's not), needs to get us riled up, divided, and angry. Not for some nefarious shadow government pulling the strings reasons, but because they need to pay the bills.

What's fascinating is how well the media as a whole manages to do it. Some portion of the masses can accept a mainstream point of view (eg wearing masks), but it seems a certain percentage of people just really have to not. And to those people (who are all the same), "alternative outlets" sell them on being special and that they are the only thinkers out there. Not like the rest of the sheep wearing muzzles. It would be funnier if it weren't literally life-threatening right now.

Step back, consider your principles, and draw your own conclusions. But it has to be okay if those conclusions simply accept what the mainstream narrative is telling you. Which is wear a mask, especially when indoors with groups of people.

[jariel]

There was nothing remotely close to 'lock-down' in the US.

We just stopped going to the office, restaurants, close quarters public spaces.

[Implicated]

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

Ahem, "everyone"?

I, and the people I went into 'lockdown' with quite enjoyed ourselves. I'd argue that this period has been the most productive for my mental health in decades.

You aren't everyone.

[captainbland]

It's almost as though traveling to work, going out and seeing loads of people is great for some and horrible for others. Like humans aren't a homogenous blob that all prefer to live one way or the other. But even though under 'business as usual' we act like people have a lot of choice, in reality because of fiscal and social constraints we really, really don't. So the question should be: how do we enable people to choose? To really choose, not to be given some false choice where one has obvious horrible social and economic consequences and risks attached to it; and the other is the good 'preferred' way to live - but to really choose freely.

[aantix]

Agree.

"People are dying".

"People" isn't a useful cohort.

Age/sex/location/lifestyle/environment/pre-existing conditions all contribute to our individual risk.

Health/financial obligations/location/social patterns contribute to our individual risk tolerance.

The CDC recommendations are not granular enough.

[msla]

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

This sounds like partisan pseudoscience.

[grensley]

> I don't care what these people read in to the data

I really didn't expect this to be the top take on HackerNews. This reads like anti-masker rhetoric.

[andybak]

It doesn't mesh with my personal experience at all so at the very least that user is massively generalising (or maybe I'm a bizarre outlier)

[layoutIfNeeded]

>Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health.

It's pretty good for my mental health. Being on crowded public is bad for my mental health.

[msla]

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

"I'm right and you can't convince me otherwise" is the cause of a lot of suffering in the world.

[uallth00]

One of my favorite ideas comes from the Dali Llama who suggests considering how ones own application of agency has created the scenario they are in.

The limbic system floods the brain with chemicals and we react with the most accessible form of motor agency given the context.

Turn the media off. Avoid the emotional hive mind which is built on making you feel exactly as you’re reacting. Impulsive, anxious, the slippery slope that ends it all is around the corner.

Because if it ends up being the case it will be a self fulfilling prophecy thanks to anxious, paranoid idiots pushing buttons they shouldn’t.

I live outside the burbs and work remote. My daily habit hasn’t changed much.

Your bubble isn’t everyone’s

I’m pretty convinced the anxiety is from the reality of the virus itself and the anxiety is misattributed to “lockdown” thanks to propaganda.

Propaganda 101: use emotional moment to insert talking point. Pandemic is a nice organic anxiety to use to nudge people towards fear of economic collapse.

You’re doing this to yourself.

[bluntfang]

>We're not meant to live that way.

I mean, to abstract this a little bit...were we meant to spend 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week, making money for other people simply because they already had money?

Were we meant to live in densely populated cities in apartment buildings that house 10s to 100s of families on a city block?

Were we meant to spend most of our time with our young children and teach them about the world instead of handing them off for 8+ hours of childcare a day starting at age 5 or 6?

this begs the question: what way were we meant to live?

[qubex]

> this begs the question: how were we meant to live?

In the savanna in social groups of about fifty or less related individuals leading a hunger-gatherer lifestyle.

I doubt the OP is going to argue that we all head back to that state, though, so I’m going politely disregard their absolutist and ex cattedra remarks.

[Johnjonjoan]

Why not also tropical rainforest? (I'm assuming you're saying we are meant to live how we did at our inception)

IMO using the word meant implies a purpose and I don't think there is one here.

[qubex]

I was just giving a quick & dirty reply, and my knowledge of anthropology is quite limited. As I understand it we evolved out of the African savanna. If there are other niches we evolved in (rather than expanded to), those would also be a valid response.

[UncleOxidant]

Yeah, it was more like eric_b saying he wasn't meant to live that way. Many of the rest of us enjoyed the slower pace, the chance to connect with family, the chance to enjoy simple pleasures like baking bread and planting a garden. I looked at the "lockdown" (which wasn't really a lockdown - see Wuhan for a real lockdown) period as a sort of sabbath for the world.

I suppose a lot of the difference in how you view that period of "lockdown" could have to do with your living situation. If you're single living in an apartment without a yard then, yes, I could see that it could be pretty awful. If you live with family and pets in a house with a yard it was pretty nice and I suspect a lot of us in that situation will look back on that period positively as time goes by - as in we'll actually become nostalgic about it.