When Your Pre-Existing Condition Is Mental Illness

          We already know how anxiety and depression plague students during this pandemic. Students are not alone, however, in battling huge mood swings or even ongoing mental illnesses under these trying circumstances. Faculty are affected, too. Consider my case. 

I am a professor of English at Perimeter College, the two-year arm of Georgia State University. A 57-year-old man in good health, I have none of the pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or lung disease, which would mark me at high risk for Covid-19.

            The CDC does report, however, that an underreported risk group includes people with “mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.” Boy howdy, does this description apply to me.

            My “walking papers” state that I have Severe Depression --- In Partial Remission. This condition is debilitating enough. What is driving me crazy (not literally, but frighteningly close), however, is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with hypochondriasis.

            OCD will eventually affect 2.3% of American adults, many of whom will interpret the slightest rash, cough, or elevated temperature as a sign of impending death. Some will race to their doctor’s office, asking to be tested for every disease imaginable.

            Cancer and AIDS have long occupied the mind of people with OCD. Consider this: a person can have cancer or HIV for years while being completely asymptomatic. These diseases lurk, hiding away inside the host’s body. A person obsessed with having scraped against a sharp surface has to wait weeks or even months before taking a reliable screening test for HIV. For some cancers, such as pancreatic, we still have no good tests.

            Now I face the coronavirus, which I can track in real time as reports of its spread dominate the news. The New York Times reports that “four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms,” while most people who have transmitted the virus have not even known they had it.

            These numbers will comfort most. They terrify me. My OCD brain glosses over the mild symptoms and notes only those who are infected but unaware.

            If I go to the store, even when I practice social distancing, I may mingle with untold coronavirus carriers. Worse yet, I could have the virus myself and be completely asymptomatic and unaware. And even if a test would reassure me (it wouldn’t), I can’t get one.

            In my house, we don’t own a thermometer, largely because I wouldn’t be able to trust myself not to use it compulsively. Thank goodness I don’t have allergies! I can only predict with fright how the sick part of my brain might interpret them.

            I am fortunate enough to have had my OCD diagnosed nearly thirty years ago, to live largely without stigma, and to have access to excellent behavior health care. Millions with OCD don’t.

            None of this is to say, however, that if some of the worst projections about Covid-19 come to pass, my preexisting condition will not drive me to seek a much more advanced level of care than I need now or that our psychiatric facilities won’t already be overwhelmed by other sufferers. Meanwhile, I can only follow the CDC's advice on how to cope with the raging pandemic and try to reach out through means such as this article to those who, like me, face the particular risks that mental health or neurological disorders bring.

            Don’t let it be the case that if the virus doesn’t get you, the worry will. Let’s meet up, by phone, computer, or both, and help each other get through this pandemic.