When historians look back at the coronavirus pandemic, they won’t simply discuss the hundreds of thousands of lost lives and widespread political, economic and social chaos. As a history graduate student, I can imagine how my colleagues would approach this from a scholarly level if they were discussing a distant event rather than a current one. They would want to know about the experiences of the individuals under quarantine, enduring seemingly endless lockdowns, terrified for their physical safety. They would ask two main questions:
- What happens to individuals when they’re forced to be isolated for long periods?
- What happens to societies and cultures?
To answer the first question, Salon turned to Dr. David Reiss, a psychiatrist and expert in mental fitness evaluations who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”