After corporations became the main employers in cities across Romania, there has been an observable shift in people's concern for their mental and emotional health. The issues faced by Romanian corporate workers have become similar to those experienced by employees in Western corporations. The orientation towards therapy stems from a need for personal development and finding identity and interests outside of work. However, the main themes initially brought up by these clients in therapy often revolve around workplace issues such as burnout and workplace bullying (mobbing).

The context of the pandemic and the shift to working from home has introduced new challenges in balancing professional and personal life. Many employees find themselves working longer hours or feeling less productive compared to working from the office.

The need to work from home and adhere to social isolation, coupled with a desire to spend quality personal time and engage in outdoor activities, has resulted in another response: temporarily moving to the countryside, to their parents' or grandparents' homes.

In the office, clients who had long struggled with anxiety were much more prepared for this globalization of anxiety. For those socially stigmatized, isolation brought much more functional behaviors, healthier mindsets, and a reduction in shame and feelings of inadequacy. For others, the pandemic provided a justifiable excuse to return to their own homes and avoid the constant strain of being in relationships that were detrimental, allowing them the peace to make decisions with their own mind. Many were relieved to stay away from exhausting office meetings and constant confrontations with colleagues. On the other hand, some cases escalated due to favorable external factors: professional and economic uncertainty, lifestyle changes, domestic tensions, increased consumption of alcohol and comfort food due to nervousness, etc. Social distancing struck a nerve of irritation for those with issues of control and rule adherence. For those who already worked a lot, they now work even more, leading to frequent burnout situations.

The most common themes encountered in therapy lately stem from a specific trait of our cultural context, namely an excessive need for control. This can lead to panic attacks, insomnia, compulsive eating, clinging to harmful relationships, emotional numbness understood as "I feel lazy and bored with everything, I don't feel like doing anything." The Romanian educational system doesn't allow children much personal expression, freedom, flexibility, or a say in setting rules. We were taught to raise our hands when asked and to feel guilty if we happened to write with our left hand. This rigidity has confiscated our autonomy, independence, the ability to discover our own path, to make mistakes, and gain self-affirmation in sync with tested personal resources and self-control. Now that we've encountered uncontrollable things, we try to compensate by controlling the small ones: cleaning the house repeatedly, arranging everything symmetrically.

But what I try to convey in therapy is that if we only do this, we haven't accomplished much. We've diverted excess negative emotions as if we're terribly afraid of them. Perhaps it's time to have life rules adapted to our own lives, to be less obedient and to take revenge for our restrictive past through an embrace of a free identity and our own arrangement in the world. Without fear of ourselves.

The pandemic will linger through its effects on our mental health. Faced with it, self-care is the only antidote. Our brain is wired to respond to danger, and its first instinct is to say, "I haven't been here before, it can't be good, I'm scared." Let's discuss with ourselves and possibly with a therapist how to build resilience to stress, tolerance for the unknown, and acceptance that we cannot (almost) control anything. It's safer to go with the flow than to resist it or turn your back and be hit hard without being able to anticipate it.

A long-term effect will be economic and social problems, felt especially by the millions who have lost or will lose their jobs, now that everything is online. It's a sort of collective drama that very few governments in the world know how to manage. Then there are parents who will continue to make exhausting sacrifices and improvisations to juggle their children's online schooling with work in the same space. It's not easy to be a good parent in general, let alone now... This will remain a problem disproportionately affecting mothers. Several recent studies show that women's double workload (between jobs and household chores) has not decreased during the pandemic. Doctors will also tire of being hailed as heroes one moment and facing uncertain status as bureaucrats the next, dealing with shortages of hospital equipment and people's distrust in the existence of the virus or medical recommendations.

Another effect of the pandemic, with major repercussions on mental health, is the increase in domestic violence (physical, verbal, emotional). Isolation places victims in the unfortunate situation of spending even more time in the same household as their abusers. Thus, women and children are exposed to abuse, which this time they may not even be able to report to authorities. In Romania, domestic violence also has a series of structural causes related to cultural context and the lack of political actions to develop accessible services for domestic violence victims. Recent debates regarding the introduction of sexual education in schools and the removal of gender ideology perhaps highlight this issue best.

I believe a very important issue remains the social stigma associated with seeking help from a psychologist or psychiatrist in Romania. This stigma often becomes internalized, leading individuals to believe that undergoing therapy or taking psychiatric medication is a sign of failure in life, and that only weak characters resort to such measures. Consequently, many people only seek therapy after the initial problem reported (anxiety, depression, addictions, etc.) has worsened significantly and life has become nearly unbearable.

Interestingly, this stigma manifests differently in rural communities and small towns compared to larger urban areas in Romania. In smaller communities, people are more willing to accept treatment prescribed by a psychiatrist because they hope it will quickly resolve their issues, similar to treating a cold or any other medical condition they have had in the past. However, they are more hesitant to engage in a therapy program. In large cities, although people view therapy as a process of self-improvement and are willing to invest time and energy into it, they reject the idea of seeing a psychiatrist, believing that only individuals with "serious problems" should seek such services.

An even more critical issue is the lack of adequate public health services and policies for mental health. Particularly in psychiatry, the approach implemented in Romania's medical system dates back to the functionalist mindset of the 1960s, where individuals with psychiatric conditions are considered dangerous and isolated from the rest of society in dedicated hospitals. After a few weeks of medication, the system sends these individuals back into society without addressing the structural causes that generate their problems (poverty, housing conditions, right to decent work, etc.) and without taking responsibility for their social reintegration. In these conditions, the aforementioned social stigma is simply perpetuated.

Approaches that have proven successful in developed countries, such as community-based services, are completely absent from Romania's public mental health system.

The scare caused by the pandemic will continue and deteriorate individuals' mental hygiene. How much cortisol can our brain endure?! Because the effects of the pandemic have not been uniformly felt, this brings much suspicion; it's as if we don't know when or from where it will strike next. The hypothalamus will be overexcited for too long.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been like children without the necessary education, not finding in authorities a good parent to listen to and teach us how to proceed in long term. We've only had authoritarian parents who infantilized us, kept us indoors, then took us out, then made us go out with declarations, and then asked us to wear masks. And we comply, but we don't grasp the entire context, our individual contribution. We are like, "Yes, boss, I'll do it, boss," then we get upset and slip a "Let's see how fast I can leave home without a mask." Moreover, being uninformed, some of us believed we were rid of the virus, and now we're getting more and more scared.

Fatalistic thinking like "nothing will be okay" arises because we long for hope that reality will contradict positively. Instead, the innate tendencies of the psyche will generate even more negativity until we enter a vicious vortex. And reality may not necessarily be a better one. Perhaps nothing will be the same, but the good part of confusion and uncertainty is that no one has yet prescribed us where to go beyond our own will. Now we can stop and choose our perspective, based on personal needs, in the absence of external criteria.

Isolation could mean self-love. And if we've been infantilized by the state, it wouldn't hurt to neutralize inner stress with some outdoor play, in nature, with music, painting, or similar activities. This is because the best decisions are made when we're not explicitly thinking about them. Anchored more in our bodies, willing to work with our hands, we'll understand our minds better. In the midst of a lack of clarity, we're forced to do what we want, what we believe is right, and the chosen path becomes a personal one, shaped in our own image.

Humanity has always gained new capabilities, among which one is essential: resilience in the face of adversity. This inner strength cannot be gained from the comfort of the bed or in benign situations. Heroes have superpowers because they've gone through dramatic trials, suffered, and been tempered. For now, the pandemic has pulled us out of existential fatigue; amid the bad things, we can feel a strange momentum called hope.