Expert to discuss post-lockdown stress on families at free public event
We’re back in level one and counting our blessings, but what effect has the lockdown period had on our children? What do they need from us now?
Professor David Murdoch, Dean of University of Otago, Christchurch, and Dr Josh Freeman, Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) Microbiology Clinical Director, will discuss The latest on the vaccine and controlling future outbreaks, while Alan Pithie, CDHB Consultant Physician in Infectious Diseases and General Medicine and Dr Taylor will talk about The ongoing impacts of COVID 19 on our health and wellbeing.
While going into lockdown was stressful, for different people in different ways, coming out of lockdown into ‘normal life’ can be just as stressful, Dr Mairin says.
“It’s really expected especially from a psychologist’s perspective, that people would struggle to come out of lockdown, because we adapt and so we develop greater comfort with a smaller world – smaller social circles and smaller physical surroundings. Children coming out of isolation, for example, from a child cancer ward often experience this type of discomfit and now we have all experienced something similar.
“Expanding that bubble is not always comfortable. We get physically overwhelmed – we have been used to being in a cave and we have to come out again – and socially it can be a stretch.”