Why Psychotherapy For Healthcare Workers Is Key During The Pandemic
One of the most important aspects to understand the crisis of the global pandemic caused by the coronavirus is the fact that, although the people most affected by the health (not economic) consequences of this global pandemic are relatively few, they are not distributed equally. equitably throughout the population.
In fact, we know that COVID-19 affects those who have health problems due to chronic illnesses much more, and among very elderly people. But beyond this first group of people vulnerable to the virus there is another who, although they are not normally harmed to the point of fearing for their lives, are also suffering a lot during these months: health professionals, mainly doctors and nursing staff.
In this article we will see to what extent During the coronavirus crisis, psychology services for healthcare workers are essential both for themselves individually, and for society as a whole, taking into account the precarious conditions in which they often have to work (for more political reasons than those pertaining to their profession).
One of the implications of this is that the physical wear and tear produced by day-to-day work, if they are hard, they are also capable of wearing us down mentally If we add to this the fact that the work itself includes tasks in which there is often a great emotional charge, the resulting combination can be very difficult to manage in the medium and long term.
In the case of the work of healthcare workers, unfortunately, these days both conditions are met: there is a lot of work, many complicated decisions in which there is an obligation to adopt ethical positions, and also they are in contact with people who suffer, and some of which even die.
Of course, professionals in this sector are able to deal with these complicated situations better than the average population, due to a mixture of training over many years of learning, on the one hand, and a filtering process that is very difficult to pass. if you deal very poorly with anguish and the need to make an effort. However, everything has a limit, and no matter how much these days we tend to praise the essential work of doctors and nursing staff, that cannot serve as a moral alibi to assume that they should be able to solve everything on their own. This is where psychotherapy comes into play.
The 5 main benefits that psychotherapy brings to doctors and nurses
These are the main reasons why psychology services applied to healthcare are essential during the COVID-19 crisis. In most cases, it is possible to benefit from them through face-to-face therapy and also through online psychological assistance by video call.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychological disorders in the general population, and their incidence is highest in health professionals. Psychological therapy allows you to overcome them effectively, whether they are phobias, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, or others.
2. Helps manage feelings of guilt and low mood
Having gone through a situation of health collapse, it has become necessary to apply triage methodologies to establish which patients have priority to be treated, often assuming a high risk of death for those who have to wait.
Going through these experiences on a regular basis can lead to situations of guilt which sometimes include anxiety-producing memories produced by the frustration or anger of patients or their families.
Psychotherapy allows you to work on these memories that are linked to problematic beliefs about yourself; Processes such as cognitive restructuring applied in psychotherapy are effective in stopping feeling bad. In the same way, It also allows you to prevent and treat the symptoms linked to clinical depression and the disorders related to it.
3. It allows you to address cases of post-traumatic stress
Exposure to unexpected deaths can lead to the development of post-traumatic stress, especially if these losses occur under very difficult circumstances. Therapy helps prevent the onset of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from consolidating, and it also treats those who already present all the symptoms of this disorder. associated with flashbacks and sleeping problems
4. Helps prevent and treat OCD
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is based on the thoughts or mental images that appear in consciousness over and over again, intrusively triggering an intense response of anxiety that the person feels the need to immediately relieve by performing certain “rituals”: compulsions.
One of its most frequent variants is OCD based on the ritual of hand washing. Faced with the distressing idea that their hands are contaminated, those who develop OCD experience serious difficulties when trying not to wash them immediately, something that can even cause lesions on their skin as the days go by.
Of course, one of the characteristics of OCD is that, as a disorder, it is made up of irrational and harmful behavioral patterns for the person and/or their environment; In the coronavirus crisis, it is normal to wash your hands a lot, but this habit can create the breeding ground for some people to begin to develop an excessive tendency to constantly put your hands under the tap
Psychological intervention helps prevent the first symptoms of OCD from leading to the consolidation of the disorder, and makes it possible to overcome the problem in cases in which OCD has already developed; For this, desensitization techniques are usually used, widely used to treat anxiety problems.
5. Allows you to solve family or relationship problems
Problems at work can translate into problems at home, either due to a tendency toward irritability and bad mood caused by fatigue, or due to a lack of dedication to anything other than thinking about work. In this sense, we must not forget that psychological intervention takes many forms, and two of them are couples therapy and family therapy.
