Psychology of the Pandemic

Abstract

There are certain similarities in the perception of mental illness and infectious diseases, such as “fear of contagion,” resulting in the public stigma that has shrouded both throughout centuries, to the point that, possibly, unconscious bias may have resulted in the lack of interest in pandemic outbreaks on the part of psychiatry. This chapter briefly examines both the near-universal fear of becoming infected and losing one’s “self” in the process and our fascination with the topic, as exemplified in our enthrallment with zombies and the “undead,” helping us better understand unconscious bias at the individual and collective levels. This chapter also briefly reviews a historic “point of intersection” when the last global pandemic (Spanish flu of 1918) significantly affected the personal life of probably the best-known psychiatrist in history and the father of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), possibly affecting his scientific reasoning and resulting theories, without receiving critical scrutiny at the time.