There was a massive increase in suicides because of the lockdowns.
My favorite thing about this study is that when you read further, they excluded young people, children, people in poor socioeconomic countries/situations, and people with preexisting mental health issues. So other than that . . . .
Lockdown was legitimately not much different for me as a chronically ill, disabled person who'd been homebound for several years due to my multiple disabilities. The only real difference was that I was no longer crushingly alone because other people were also home and suddenly remembered I existed.
Seeing those same people then compare my lived existence for the last seven years as being torturous and inhumane was both infuriating and validating.
As was seeing all the accommodations like work from home and distance learning which people like me had always been told were impossible to implement and would take too much effort. And yet companies swiveled on a dime and managed it pretty much overnight. Sure, it was a scramble and stressful, but could you imagine how much easier it would have been if they'd implemented these accommodations more widely for disabled people prior to a global pandemic?
Accommodations which, by the way, are now being taken away again. Why? Fuck you, that's why.
The main thing my mental health will never recover from, however-- along with the crushing weight of all the people that died and continue to die -- was seeing and continuing to see how many people consider my death as an acceptable statistic in the crusade to "get back to normal."
Fuck you. There was no acceptable "normal" before. You just didn't care about us.
How did you not come out of this experience totally radicalized and ready to fight for disabled people? Where's your fucking rage? Where's your humanity?
