Inside the mental health shadow pandemic caused by COVID-19

“The world is too much, yet at the same time it doesn’t feel like enough.”

That’s what my 22-year-old patient “Matt” said to me during one of our sessions last September. His blonde hair was sticking in strands across his forehead as he anxiously rocked back and forth. Eye contact was minimal as his eyes kept darting from left to right. He wasn’t used to speaking to anyone in … dare I say it? In person. He was like so many of the other clients in our young-adult treatment program: very bright and very functional through high school, yet suffering from “failure to launch” once they went off to college, eventually flunking out and living back at mom and dad’s house. Depressed and unemployed, Matt fell into a daily rut of “waking and baking” (smoking pot as soon as he woke up) and then sitting in his recliner escaping in his video games for hours, sometimes days.