Then there is a third issue which Dr. Fauci can confirm to all of us. There is a distrust, abysmal distrust of authority. People don’t trust authority and experts. They don’t trust science. They don’t trust us. People distrust the government, distrust experts, doctors, therapists, pharmaceutical companies, laboratories, universities, politicians, and the media, at least the mainstream media.

Instead, people rely on uninformed word of mouth. Word of mouth is the main source of news nowadays. Charlatans, guillotans, con artists whose trashy wares are purveyed on YouTube and other such online unmitigated garbage dumps.

There is no resilience, no immune system, no intellectual immune system. We have been poisoned venomously by these platforms.

And Dr. Ahmed mentioned before me that these platforms lead to enhanced rates of depression and anxiety, and may I add, suicide. There are numerous studies by Twenge and Campbell, for example, linking a quintupling of anxiety disorder rates and a tripling of clinical depression rates, and a 45% rise in suicide among people younger than 25. And all these are inextricably linked to a single factor, the use of social media, screen time.

And finally, the fourth trend that predated the pandemic and fed into it and exacerbated it, and made it virulent the way it is, is of course, narcissism, pathological narcissism. Infatuation with one’s self, such infatuation leads to extreme risk aversion, inordinate measures of pampering, self-medication, self-protection.

People consider their cosmically significant and unprecedentedly unique and treasured lives and bodies to be worthy of the utmost efforts at preservation, at the expense of everyone else. People think that if they want to have fun, they’re entitled to it. Entitlement, pernicious, toxic entitlement, drives young people to party and to contract COVID-19 and give it to their elders without dedicating a single thought to what it might do to granny.

This is a narcissistic behavior, not only self-centered, but egocentric to the point of endangering others, entitled to the point of disrupting and destroying social solidarity and any modicum of empathy and altruism.

You see, the pandemic created what we call in technology, narcissistic mortification. Narcissistic mortification has been defined by Freud, paraphrased by Rodinstam in 2013, as the intense fear associated with narcissistic injury and humiliation, the shocking reaction when individuals and collectives face the discrepancy between an endorsed or ideal view of the self and a drastically contrasting realization.

Rothschild, another scholar of personality disorders, wrote about narcissistic mortification, that it is the fear of falling short of ideals with a loss of perfection and accompanying humiliation. And this fear of narcissistic mortification, this fear of being helpless, of being hopeless, of being denied your rights, your right to have fun, your right to party, your right to, you know, to get all the services, this fear extends to intimacy. In interpersonal relationships, Fiscellini described it in his work. It leads to unrealized or forbidden wishes and to related defenses, Horowitz described it.

And as Kohut so aptly summarized the whole thing, it is a fear associated with rejection, with isolation, with a loss of contact with reality, a loss of admiration, a loss of equilibrium, and a loss of important familiar objects.

Perfect description of our condition right now amidst the pandemic.

Otto Kernberg augmented this list by adding that narcissistic mortification is a fear of dependency, dependency on the state, for example, dependency on others, dependency on medical authorities, on hospitals and so on. So it’s a fear of dependency and destroying the relationship with meaningful others. It’s a fear of retaliation of one’s own aggression, destructiveness.

It’s a fear, says Kernberg, of death, fear of death. Narcissistic mortification is therefore a sudden sense, sudden sense, owing to an external shock, a sudden sense of defeat, a sudden feeling of loss of control over eternal or external objects or realities. Andrealities.

And it is caused by an aggressing person or by an aggressive event like the pandemic. It is caused also by a compulsive trait of behavior.

So our reactions only exacerbate the mortification, make it much worse because suddenly we feel that we are losing control also over ourselves and how we react. We feel that we are being discombobulated, disintegrated. We no longer recognize ourselves in this pandemic.

It brings out the worst in us, sometimes brings out the best in us, but more often the worst. It produces disorientation, dislocation, terror as distinct from anticipatory fear, terror. It brings out depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia, damming up of narcissistic, ego libido ordestrudo moti, as it was described by Eidelberg in 1957.

And the entire personality in the conditions of the pandemic is overwhelmed by impotent, impotent in an ineluctable, a lack of alternatives, an inability to force objects to conform to our wishes. We can’t rely on anyone’s goodwill, on anything’s goodwill. We can’t bargain. We can’t bargain with the virus.

Mortification reflects the activity of infantile, childlike strategies of coping with frustration or with repression.

One such strategy is grandiosity. Mortification reflects attendant psychological defense mechanisms, for example, splitting or denial or magical thinking.

And we see all this panoply of childish behaviors among individuals, but I must say, among governments, among politicians, and even among shockingly medical, medical practitioners, medical doctors, psychotherapists, psychologists, we are all regressed, we’ve all been regressed to childhood and we react very often in non-adult ways.

The pandemic of COVID-19 hit everyone simultaneously as a universal, inescapable external shock. And several elements that I mentioned before rendered it traumatic.

I will finish by mentioning Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the American Swiss psychologist. She described five stages of grief.

What is it that we are grieving over? What are we mourning?

We are grieving the world that is gone and will never return. We are grieving our old lives. We are grieving our habits. We are grieving our disappeared and vanishing friendships. We are grieving the closure of businesses which constituted an integral part of our landscape. We are grieving the death and destruction, devastation around us.

This is grief, the likes of which the majority of people have never experienced before and hopefully will never experience again.

But it is massive, all-pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable, ineluctable grief.

And Kubler-Ross described five stages, denial.

It started with denial. People were denying that the virus is real. They still do many of them. People were denying the pandemic is real, plannedemic. They claimed the pandemic was some conspiracy by some cabal or some institution. People were denying that there is a pandemic at all.

Denial. This was followed by anger. People were angry. They didn’t know who to be angry at. Should they be angry at nature, at the virus, at God, at institutions, at politicians, at doctors, who to be angry.

This became diffuse anger. And it is manifested today, for example, in activism, social activism, like Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is a movement of aggression and anger.

Luckily, it’s directed properly. But it’s still anger. So there’s anger.

And then there’s bargaining. We are bargaining with the virus. Can we go out a little this evening? Can we go to the local pub? Can we go to the beach, providing we put a face mask? Can we put a face mask and go to the library? I mean, we are negotiating. Who are we negotiating with? Who are we negotiating with?

You can’t negotiate with death. You can’t negotiate with illness. The virus won’t talk to you. It’s his way or the highway.

And yet we are bargaining with each other, with our governments, with our politicians, with our local authorities, with the doctors at the hospital, with the doctors at the clinics. We are sick, but we are not sick. We have a mild condition. We will go. We will not go. We will take medicine. We will not take medicine.

This antiviral data, we are bargaining. We are bargaining as dog. We have a power.

It’s self-delusion that we have control, that we have some potency, that we have some contribution and some involvement. We don’t. We are totally passive, totally helpless recipients of the wrath and the punishment that the virus is because it’s a punishment for mistreating nature.

And finally, there’s depression and acceptance. We are very far from acceptance, but we are entering the phase of depression.

Studies in the United States have shown that 34% of the other population have developed clinical depression, major depressive episode, and 20% of the other population have developed new anxiety disorders.

We are going through the fourth phase of the Kubler-Ross cycle. We’re going through depression. Will we learn to accept that the virus is with us forever, endemic, to stay? Will we learn to see the virus as yet another cause of death, like cancer?

One-third of all cancers are actually viral in origin. So will we learn to accept? Or will we keep on fighting? Will we keep on denying with idiotic conspiracy theories? Will we keep on being angry at the wrong targets? Will we keep on bargaining with God, with His angels, or with viruses?

What are we doing?

We need to accept and rationalize this process. We need to adopt commenduous steps in order not to damage ourselves even more than the virus does.

We need to stop with Hispanic and hysteria.

And if we don’t, maybe then we will suffer from collective PTSD. That’s where we’re going. That’s exactly where we’re going.

Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you, Dr.

Sam, for your nice speech on the live survey of COVID-19, actually. Thank you.

So I would like to request to the audiences if they’re having any question, then they definitely can ask you, Dr. Sam.

Sam, thank you very much, Dr. Asif, again.

Yes, thank you.

It was a lovely impassioned presentation of the current times.

Thank you.

And you brought it out very beautifully, the human emotions that we’re going through, including the grief process.

But what do you look at the way forward, Sam? What is the solution?

How do we deal with this best, psychologically?

I think, as I said, the conclusion of my so-called speech was exactly a presentation. I think the critical step, by far, is acceptance.

We got stuck in the Kubler-Ross model. We got stuck in the wrong stages.

Some of us are stuck in denial. And some of us are stuck in defiance.

Defiance, antisocial defiance, actually.

Some of us are stuck in bargaining.

Many people become overly religious or develop account, believe in the account, or these kind of things.

All of us seem to display totally dysfunctional reactions.

Some medical professionals are focused on producing a vaccine or producing a cure.

But even this is done psychopathologically.

Because if you look at the discourse, if you analyze the texts that are coming out of the medical doctor as well, that are coming out of the medical profession, you see that the texts are actually magical thinking.

The texts are pathological in the mental health sense. They are not typical scientific texts.

They are far more the equivalent of wishful thinking, or cutting corners, or defiance in the face of the virus.

So there’s a lot of pathology around.

We need to accept.

And cultures, certain cultures, maybe, honestly, older cultures.

I’m a Jew, you know? The Jews have been around for 4,000 years. Maybe older cultures can teach the younger cultures, the adolescent cultures, the adolescent societies, to accept, not to be submissive, not to submit, not to surrender, but to accept.

And this I see as the critical issue.

The second critical issue, I think, is that the pandemic just exacerbated a series of social trends that long predated the pandemic.

And I mentioned, for example, social media and so on and so forth.

People have migrated to cyberspace and to virtual spaces and to virtual reality long before the pandemic.

The pandemic just cemented this trend.

We must fight this with all our force. We must fight this with all our force because interpersonal interactions, which are not mediated via technology, have, I don’t need to tell you, many, many benefits, health benefits, mental health benefits. They are regulatory in nature. They have to regulate emotions. They have to reduce mood lability. They have to control narcissistic and psychopathic features, anti-social features of behavior, which every human being has. They provide calibration so you know where you stand and whether you are acting properly or improperly. They are also means of socialization and social control.

Interpersonal interactions are critical.

And what this pandemic has done, it had falsely convinced people that technology could be a full substitute.

You see huge companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter announcing proudly that even after the pandemic, people will work from home. They will not need to come to an office, God forbid. They will work from home.

Atomization became a tenant of a new religion, the religion of the lone wolf.

We will not survive this, not as societies and not as a species. We are collaborative species.

Empathy was created to enable this. And we will not survive. We are not a lone wolf species. We don’t have the tools, we don’t survive this.

I’m very worried about this aspect. We need to force people by, for example, changing the parameters of social media usage. We need to force them to interpersonal interactions.

And we are going exactly the opposite way.

I’m worried about this as well.

In general, these are the two things that worry me most, but I’m worried about many other aspects.

Yes, I totally agree with you on the salubriousness and the protective effects of social connectedness.

And that’s why my objection to the usage of the term itself about social distancing, I think it goes. It’s totally anti-pathic to human nature.

But given the fact that we need to maintain physical distance and we need to avoid crowds and we need to avoid people, the challenge is going to be how do we remain connected as a species, as a human being, but for the technological platforms.

I mean, I would also love to have a face-to-face consultation professionally. And socially, I would like to be amongst friends. But if that’s not going to be possible, what is the alternative?

That is the challenge which I think we need to deal with.