Damage from lockdown: soaring sales for alcohol and psychiatric drugs
Someone said it was just a "flu", that the real virus was racism, the former premier Conte that Italy was "very ready" for any type of pandemic. They seem distant, remote words, but only a year has passed. We know how it ended and what the reality is: Italians have been living with the word lockdown for exactly one year, our life is divided in colors, limited by curfews, limited to Municipalities or maximum Regions. “Everything will be fine”, we wrote everywhere, but we understood that our life would change forever. Covid-19 has radically changed our life, it has penetrated our homes and changed our way of living, working, socializing. We found ourselves making video calls, living with our heads down on mobile phones closed in our homes and then realizing that everything we need is outside, in real life. After a year we realized that no screen can replace a hug, a kiss, a smile, no video call can replace the emotion of real socialization.
According to experts, we will carry around the side effects of the lockdown for a long time, starting with the children and adolescents who have been, perhaps, those most affected by the restrictions we are forced to live with.
Effects of imprisonments that are already beginning to be glimpsed. In fact, the lockdown turns out to be fertile ground for alcoholism. The increase in alcohol consumption is reflected in the data released nationwide on sales: there is talk of an increase of 180 percent. For some it is a relapse, for still others it is a novelty, but alcohol turns out to be one of the most dangerous enemies because it affects the weakest and most lonely people.
Another fact that should not be underestimated, but rather to look at with a magnifying glass, is that relating to 'mental health'. Generalized anxiety, depression and sleep disturbances are the most common consequences. Massimo Di Giannantonio, elected president of the Italian Psychiatry Society recently gave interviews in which he clearly expresses his concern, declaring that the psychological consequences of the pandemic will be serious and widespread. Di Giannantonio also declares that many people have found refuge in self-therapies, consuming legal psychopharmacological substances such as anxiolytics, hypnotics and antidepressants. More subjects are those who have lost their jobs, those who have lost loved ones, people obviously loneliest and weakest. Unfortunately, the graph on the growth in sales of anxiolytics compared to the previous year published by AIFA does not need further comments.
The post Damage from lockdown: soaring sales for alcohol and psychiatric drugs appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/danni-da-lockdown-impennata-di-vendite-per-alcol-e-psicofarmaci/ on Wed, 03 Mar 2021 04:47:00 +0000.