By Charlotte Webster-
Mental health groups in Aberdeen have expressed concern that the new national lockdown rules will distress people already suffering with mental health problems, leaving them feeling “worn down” and “deflated”.
The challenges facing people who are not in employment, but depend on the company of others to sustain their joy can be particularly high for some groups of people. Keeping satisfactorily occupied throughout a third lockdown after enduring the past two is going to be too much for some people.
Graeme Kinghorn, a director at Mental Health Aberdeen has expressed deep concern that this lockdown has come too soon.
He said: “We’re essentially going back to where we were at the end of March 2020. It’s essentially a full lockdown.
“It’s probably going to come as more of a shock, I suspect, to people this time around because we had the good news of the vaccine just before Christmas and then you go into the Christmas period and everybody relaxes a wee bit.
“Then all of a sudden we’re hit with these new restrictions which probably couldn’t come at a worse time, for all sorts of reasons.
“Lockdown in the summer time, for a lot of people, wasn’t as bad as it could have been purely because the weather was decent and in April and May a lot of people were out and about doing their exercise, etc.
“It’s much more difficult to do that now. It’s dark, if you’re working all day at home then you’re going to have to try and take your breaks when you can, it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s wet. None of these things helps to lift your spirits.
“I think the timing coming right off the back of Christmas when people had maybe begun to relax a little bit, it’s really not good news from our perspective in terms of how it’s going to affect the ordinary man in the street.
“People have been worn down and it gets harder and harder for their resilience to cope with things like this.”
Graeme said the move meant the charity would have to go back to using the phone and Zoom to deliver its services.
He added: “We’ll have to close down, almost completely, the hubs that we have where people come in and receive counselling. None of that is our preferred method of delivery.
“We’ll have a number out so that people can phone directly into that helpline, they don’t need to be referred by a GP.
“If they want to speak to somebody they’ll be able to use the helpline, which operated pretty successfully during the summer.
“We’d begun to ease it off but obviously now we’ll have to go right back to it because for some people it’s their only point of contact.
“People are just going to feel really deflated. This is not a good time of year normally, off the back of Christmas, people going back to work.
“You’ve got that on top of, if you’ve got kids, doing the home schooling because schools are closed.
“All it’s going to do is put pressure on an already very pressurised system from our point of view.
“This is probably the worst time of year, I would have thought, to go back into this almost full lockdown situation. But if we have to do it, everybody really needs to try and abide by it.”
Graeme said a new helpline number would be posted on Mental Health Aberdeen’s social media pages in the coming day or two.
She said: “We are a group for people with long-term mental health conditions. It’s a self-management group so it’s all based around helping people self-manage their own conditions on their own terms.
“Throughout this, we’ve been on Zoom from the first day of lockdown trying to provide as many sessions as possible, anything from chatting to goal-setting to arts and crafts and anything we can to bring people together.
“I think what everyone has found the most difficult has been the isolation and not being able to see the people they love.
“I had a discussion recently with some of our clients and they were saying even if they had preferred to be on their own before being forced into that situation, it’s been really, really hard for them to be told they’re not all
owed to go to places they enjoy like coffee shops and group chats”