Last time I wrote about people’s need for certainty during the pandemic, and how this need for certainty was driving people to try to control others. As I was writing it, I thought about my neighbour who has very serious contamination OCD which causes her pronounced mental and physical ill-health. I realised how much of my neighbour’s private behaviour is currently being publicly replicated by people’s corona-fuelled madness.
I live in a flat in a house which has been split into 4 flats, which means that each resident shares a communal hallway. This is, of course, normal for the billions of people who live in flats around the world. What is not normal is that my neighbour’s need to control her environment causes her to lie about her neighbours, because our use of the communal hallway (i.e. accessing and leaving our homes) leaks into her plastic coated world. So she lies about us to try to control us by way of sanctions from the landlord. Her reason for doing so is to try to bring us into line with her needs and desires for the space she is forced to share on the rare occasions she leaves her flat. The problem is, her needs are not normal needs, they are the needs of a profoundly unwell person.
The enormous irony is that modern research is showing that OCD is likely caused by a streptococcus infection. So no matter how much my neighbour washes and sanitises and scrubs, she will never be clean because the pathogen is inside her. In fact, the research is showing that it is precisely the pathogen which causes her to obsessively clean, since it is impervious to washing, unlike other microbes. Therefore, her most likely route to physical and mental health is, perversely from her perspective, for her to encourage more bacteria into her life so that the beneficial ones can thrive at the expense of the pathogenic ones. (As an aside, Sea Moss / Irish Moss has been shown to do just this in respect of streptococcus.)
It seems to me that people suffering from acute COVID-fear are suffering from a type of OCD in one way or another. Terrible lies are told about unvaccinated people to try to get us to conform to the needs of their neuroses, just as my neighbour lies about others in the house. And also like her, given that COVID has a recovery rate of over 99%, the real pathogen is already inside you: your fear. Let’s not forget that the risk from COVID is disproportionately borne by the elderly and those already in poor health. You can’t do anything about age, but you can do something about your own poor or ill-health. So why won’t you empower yourself?