Patrick McNamara M.C.S.W., Ph.D.
Year After Twenty
Looking Back on 2020 and Forward to 2021
Consider helping to others this year with holiday help.
Posted May 07, 2021
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“It’s OK to not be OK right now and to just do your best to get through this truly unprecedented time" was a common quote from 2020 Nobel Laureate Dr. William (Bill) Percy, who has been speaking and organizing about the pandemic and other social crises since 1970. Percy, like millions of people around the world, spoke and directed about what he could do to help the people of the world, and he has been and continues to be an inspiration and role model to millions who are just now starting to follow.
Dr. Percy spoke at a roundtable discussion (with many of the speakers) about the state of social experiments in 2020 and the historic and unprecedented nature of this pandemic, a year of social experimentation and incredible personal loss. Here is a edited transcript of the full video.
Looking back on all of it, there seems to be a lot of ground for criticism.
Looking forward to the future, what can we learn from what has happened?
It’s definitely a scary time, polar opposites can be lethal. I’ve been doing social experiments in the 1950s in the East Germany Autogrionic Organization to investigate what happens when people are psychologically driven to violence against East German civilians.
What I discovered is that the people who were driven by political goals were very effective at suppressing the rest of the population.
What I also discovered is that when people were psychologically healthy and had access to a social-scientifically verifiable fact, they were just as effective.
The media, Hollywood, and on cable news always paints a distorted picture of what life is like for people who are driving the social-scientific barricades. You can get dug into the ruts once the rest of the population is liberated.
The election of 2020 changed everything
20 is a new year. This has brought us to the point of no return.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely exhausted from the pandemic and looking to the new year with renewed hope.
I’m going to take a moment to let you know that I’m also going to be writing about New Year’s Eve anxieties in the fall and explore why the adrenaline cycle is so arousing in the pandemic.
I’ve been writing about social experiments in my work with young people in the Depression Resilience Project in collaboration with my university’s Brock Pacific Asia Center. This project aims to provide psychotherapy, conversion therapy, and mindfulness to marginalized and oppressed groups.
This past spring, I was coordinating the redesign of the school’s social media presence. We had initially planned to distribute flyers celebrating a police officer’s graduation with a police cap and gown (which I sponsored) to celebrate the high school’s valedictorian. High school seniors were particularly attached to their police SUVs. They played music both in person and online, and they all wanted to wear a matching cap and gown to display during graduation.
Now that the pandemic is over, we are once again balancing many important aspects of our lives with the politics of social media, where we live in close proximity to others, and in which we may sometimes but never always choose to share simple, intimate conversations.
We still have a long way to go to a time in which cyberbullying was more of a social media non-event, and in which police were pictured with their hands in the air or where they had their cameras trained on them.
The number of antidepressants had more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, making the psychological impact of increased mental health concerns even more poignant.
Mental health has been affected by the pandemic in unique ways
While special training in trauma and war resulted in improvements in communication between mental health professionals, improved ability to access medication, and a decrease in the number of suicide attempts, data has shown that the increased psychiatric symptoms seen in the U.S. since March are largely due to the stress of the pandemic’s effects.