Catastrophizing in the Age of COVID: Social Structures of Care in Response to Apocalyptic Losses of Control and Social Isolation

This post is a part of The COVID-Chronicles series. This series is dedicated to giving voice to graduate student experiences and needs during the course of the pandemic. It is a space for graduate students to come together, to share, to listen, to reflect, to empathize, to lament, and to learn from one another. We hope that faculty and administrators will listen to and engage in dialogue with graduate students, and act in ways to help support the graduate student community

The Editors of this series would like to note that this post engages with the themes of depression, anxiety, trauma, and death. It is crucial publish stories like these because they confront incredibly timely and important issues which impact many members of our professional community. However, we equally recognize that such stories can elicit strong emotional reactions, so we caution readers to please be aware of this.

Even before the current pandemic, persons with severe depression were largely dismissed and neglected by social institutions, such as universities, which operate under neoliberal ideologies positing variations of an individualist social ontology; an ontology that holds that humans are nothing but individual, self-interested, wealth-maximizers. Considered as “mentally ill” with some sort of “chemical imbalance” that is fully treatable by buying and taking a pill, the onus of blame and responsibility for a person’s psychological vulnerability is squarely placed on the individual as opposed to dysfunctional socio-political structures. Within this context, the impact of the pandemic has had particularly pernicious effects on persons who are already susceptible to psychological self-abuse, anxiety, catastrophizing, and social-isolation. 

I, a PhD candidate in Philosophy, have severe depression, born largely from trauma; born from being thrown into a world that created the conditions where the people who were supposed to protect and comfort me, who were supposed to teach me how to navigate the hostilities of the world, were wholly incapable of doing so because they, in turn, were never protected and comforted. Instead, they coped with all of their anger, fear, and hopelessness by turning it against me, over and over and over and over again. 

My phenomenological world neither feels, sounds, nor appears like those of people who have not shared my experiences. I have trouble relating to people – building and maintaining relationships because I have been trained to immediately distrust and to expect harm because I deserve it. And I deserve it because I am a completely inadequate and worthless object. In my world, it does not matter what I do, nothing will ever change – I will always be inadequate and worthless, and I will never be cared for by anyone. There is a sense of a complete lack of control over making my life and world better. So my world is very isolated – people cannot hurt you if you do not give them the opportunity. The only control I have is to remain encased in psychological armor and put up literal and figurative walls between myself and the rest of the world. 

My life as a grad student has been filled with expecting the worst at any given moment to happen. Something really great happened to me – I was accepted to grad school doing something I love: philosophy. Something else really great happened – I passed all of my exams and reached candidacy. Great things simply do not happen in my world without a negative correlation, something worse happening in order to balance out the universe. The expectation of failure is ever present, hanging over everything I have done. I will never be able to pass the doctoral exams – I will never be able to write my dissertation – I will never get published – I will never be able to get a job – I am going to end up homeless, dying a painful death alone. 

To someone without depression, my world sounds hyperbolic and overly dramatic – like a joke to be laughed at or a “cry for attention.” Just get over it, don’t be so sensitive, pull yourself up by your psychological bootstraps, stop playing the victim role, stop being a selfish jerk because other people have it worse than you do. With these sorts of responses to my honest display of vulnerability, my armour hardens and the walls around me get thicker. Spinoza argues that people should not be ostracized for their beliefs, because our most ingrained beliefs are largely outside of our control – you either believe in X or you don’t. I cannot make myself not be depressed – it’s something I can mitigate with techniques, but it will always be there. The causes of my depression are varied and interactive, and one can exist without the others, but it is important to highlight their structural sources and how they are worsened by the pandemic.

I have developed ways of coping with my situation, and thus of gaining more of a sense of control over my life and world. With the emergence of the Coronavirus and the subsequent shut down of daily life, I lost all of my ways of coping – the gym, botanical gardens, library, and movie theatres were no longer options for me to refocus and get out of my own head. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir writes: 

Since the pandemic, I have been living in an absurd vegetation. It has created a situation in which what little control I felt I had to cope with my situation, to surpass the facts of my existence, has vanished, resulting in my psyche repetitively spiralling through catastrophizing ideations. I have, very bluntly, simply been waiting to die. 

I imagine that I am not alone, and I imagine this because the conditions that have been so impactful on my life are not unique to me – they are social structures. In Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, Eva Kittay writes: 

“To each according to his or her [or their] need for care, from each according to his or her [or their] capacity for care, and such support from social institutions as to make available resources and opportunities to those providing care, so that all will be adequately attended in relations that are sustaining.”

I love this quote because in one sentence Kittay is not only pointing out how important care is for sustaining life, but is also pointing out how capacities for care are promoted, or conversely thwarted, by social structures. At the same time, she is pointing out how capacities for care are gradational and to the extent that one is capable, one is responsible for caring for others. Society, as a collection of individuals who share space and time, she notes, is responsible for creating social structures that promote caring and sustaining relationships. In “A Human Right Against Social Deprivation,” Kimberley Brownlee argues caring and sustaining human relationships are a human right because “when we are deprived of adequate social connections … we tend to break down mentally, emotionally, and physically.” 

Any response by academic institutions to the Coronavirus epidemic needs to incorporate a way of combating, in some manner, the alienating social structures and ideologies that are already pervasive in neoliberal societies. It needs to create methods for addressing the increase in psychological distress that even people without severe depression are susceptible to feel due to social isolation brought about by the pandemic. Moreover, it needs to adequately address the situation of severely depressed persons, who are among the most vulnerable during this time. 

Editors Note: Mental health is a serious problem within the academy, and within philosophy graduate programs more specifically. If you or someone you know is struggling please reach out to local, instructional, or national resources. Below are some resources which are free to all: 

Please take care of yourself and others as we navigate the challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Betty Jean Stoneman

Betty Jean Stoneman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. Betty’s dissertation devises a theory of civil disobedience based on Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical and political thought. Betty’s research interests include normative and applied ethics, social and political philosophy, and French existentialism.