The hardest challenge for me as a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst around COVID-19 has been the management of children and adolescents while I do psychoanalytic work by working with them remotely.
Along with this challenge, there are concerns about helping parents who may not be prepared for the roles they are being asked to do; becoming teachers or coaching their children and at the same time working from home remotely. The kind of coexistence with all family members during the lockdown is certainly a new way for stay at home parents to be accessible at all times for their children.
Parents do what they can and what is asked of them or expected of them while knowing people outside everywhere are suffering and dying. We know that our medical system is broken and breaking further. How can parents protect themselves and their children while they stay at home, isolated from people they love and the ones they rely on for their children?
At the same time, we as mental health professionals since early March 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID -19) outbreak a pandemic, our lives have been drastically changed.
To maintain our own mental and physical health, we must remind ourselves and give ourselves permission to change the narrative of “the patient is always first” to “the patient is not always first”–only first when we know we have exercised self- compassion.
Transitioning from being in body in our consultation room to being present only by our voice and visual image can present challenge, more so when we work with children. I remember working with an eight-year-old bright boy remotely by sharing screen and doing together Minecraft; a computer game. At the very end of our session, when I said we had only 5 more minutes to the end our time, our connection abruptly stopped.
I tried to enlist his parents to help us to resume our connection, and after 10 minutes waiting, I succeeded to see him on the screen, and I said bye for now and I will see you on two days.
His parent told me that he became intensely anxious and started crying. When I resumed my connection with him, He told me “How would I know and if you were not kidnapped?” The abrupt disconnection with me was a traumatic separation from me, especially with his history of having had a mother with post-partum depression.
Hopefully, there will come a time when we will resume our normal lives. Until then, we should acknowledge the uncertainty without reacting immediately to the anxiety that it creates.
