The roles of a psychiatrist in the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions have strained personal psychological resilience, tested family relationships, fragmented local communities, disrupted schools and other educational institutions, exhausted health and social services, and drained national economies. Initial concerns necessarily focused on the ability of primary care services and general hospitals to cope with a potentially overwhelming wave of physically unwell patients. Attention is now being drawn to adverse effects of the pandemic on individual and societal mental health. Mental health services have important roles in mitigating the adverse effects of the pandemic and associated measures such as enforced isolation and regional lockdown on individual mental health, in supporting the recovery of psychologically affected individuals and an exhausted health workforce, and in fostering community resilience and cohesiveness.