Michael R. Mantell, PhD

Our role in the mental helping professions is largely to facilitate clients’ and patients’ abilities to reduce and eliminate their self-created emotional blocks, to disturb themselves less, and to become more fully functioning and self-actualizing, in order to live longer, happier, lives. Yet, highly negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors anchored in irrational cognitions interfere with these goals.

 in 1948, the phrase, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” comes to mind. In the midst of this current head-spinning, mentally straining, emotionally draining, perplexing pandemic that is leaving many with a jaded, burned-out weariness, mental health and allied professionals can alleviate considerable pain.

How? By stepping out of our professional lemonade stands and through the lens of accelerating public peak living, teach society how to make—not sell—their own lemonade. This will go a long way towards preventing and treating COVID-19-related anxiety, depression, anger, self-pity, guilt, and other self-defeating behaviors.

,” then COVID-19 offer a work-from-home opportunity to earn a graduate-level degree in resilient lemonade-making. Perhaps we can offer the following

1. Teach the value of labeling the expertise and wisdom they have within themselves. Help them recognize their overly subjective, absolutistic, rigid, and irrational views they hold of themselves, others, and their world.

2. Empower people to stay true to the wellspring of proper morals and ethical ideals that have rightly guided them throughout their lives. Guide them through the challenges this pandemic poses.

3. Help people uncover or attain their personal determination that help them not only survive from but flourish through the daily storm that COVID-19 brings.

4. Help the public bring peace and quiet to the mental distractions of the here and now and begin to “

 of the AMA. Note that in Section 7 it says, “A physician shall recognize a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health.”

earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Chief Psychologist for Children’s Hospital of San Diego, the San Diego Police Department, and as Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD Medical School.

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In the midst of this current head-spinning, mentally straining, emotionally draining, perplexing pandemic that is leaving many with a jaded, burned-out weariness, mental health and allied professionals can alleviate considerable pain.

The Weary Yet Mighty Lemon Tree

More than ever before, mental health professionals are facing the need to drive groundbreaking, innovative, and fresh delivery systems to treat anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse, and domestic violence. While these are inevitable consequences of physical isolation and reduced socialization, emotional strain is not limited to COVID-19-related challenges.

 proposed the need “to bolster our mental health system in preparation for the inevitable challenges precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” Perhaps most forward-thinking is their call to recognize “the opportunity to advance our understanding of how to provide prevention-focused, population-level, and indeed national-level psychological first aid and mental health care, and to emerge from this pandemic with new ways of doing so.”

Several years ago, I urged industry leaders at a major fitness conference to leapfrog past the Roman and Greek gymnasium model and create what I called an “optimal health center” (OHC). A singular reason drove my passion and mission then, to equalize health-harming health disparity. Similarly, mental health professionals should seek to offer emotional education to victims of COVID-19 and to encourage early intervention services beyond traditional medical settings.

An OHC model could offer integrated, emotional education to help all patients, not just those with COVID-19-related mental health concerns. It would provide guidance for proper nutrition, physical activity, mental/emotional wellbeing, and recuperative sleep and relaxation. It would focus on preventive care, healthy relationships, continuous renewal, and spiritual balance.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nontraditional lay people can provide 

in the setting of what was once thought of simply as a gymnasium but now is a center of integrative health. There, people can provide emotional support to each other while creating an inclusive healthier lifestyle. It takes teamwork, focus, and placing health ahead of profit. That might be the greatest challenge.

“Tiffany” is a 43-year-old married mother of three children whose husband is on the verge of losing his job. In the aftermath of the pandemic, going to OHC is a healthy leisure activity. There, she has the opportunity to take a brief emotional education class with a mental health professional on how to meditate for anxiety reduction. She learns how to bring specific guided stress prevention tactics into her yoga stretching. She attends a brief cognitive behavioral class within the OHC aimed at building an optimistic outlook.

It is possible that patients like Tiffany can find a practical, acceptable, easily accessible, and normalizing routine to attend to their emotional well-being. Coupled with that, physical activity can help boost the physiological benefits that exercise brings.

 earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Chief Psychologist for Children’s Hospital of San Diego, the San Diego Police Department, and as Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD Medical School.

1. Galea S, Merchant RM, Lurie N. The Mental Health Consequences of COVID-19 and Physical Distancing: The Need for Prevention and Early Intervention. 

While anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse. and domestic violence are inevitable consequences of physical isolation and reduced socialization from coronavirus, emotional strain is not limited to COVID-19.

Emotional Education and the Gymnasium

“But Daddy, what’s going to happen to me if you or Mommy get sick with this bad disease that everyone’s talking about?” This came out of the mouth of a 9-year-old overhearing the latest fear-based media commentary. Anticipatory grief is a form of dealing with loss before it happens, and complicated grief brings intense, persistent, and debilitating anguish for months following actual loss. These are becoming all too common in this time of COVID-19.

Thomas Ã¡ Kempis, a German-Dutch canon 

 a healthy type of grief as dealing with the “proper sorrows of the soul.”

 Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, an early Hassidic master, 

, “There are two kinds of sorrow . . . When a person broods over the misfortunes that have come upon him, when he cowers in a corner and despairs of help-that is a bad kind of sorrow. The other kind is the honest grief of a person who knows what he lacks.”

Mental health professionals charged with compassionate care for those facing a radically changing world filled with loss have one narrow task. Helping those in emotional pain experience the control that flows from healthily airing anguish, staying focused on the here and now, and acquiring acceptance of the “proper sorrows of the soul.” These are the powerful therapeutic tools in today’s enlightened psychiatric doctor’s black bag.

Dr Mantell earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Chief Psychologist for Children’s Hospital of San Diego, the San Diego Police Department, and as Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD Medical School.

1. Pies RW. Depression or “Proper Sorrows”-Have Physicians Medicalized Sadness? 

2. Lou C. Thoughts for Bein Ha’Mitzarim (Within the Straits) – The Three Weeks. His Israel. July 20, 2016. 

https://his-israel.com/2016/07/20/thoughts-for-bein-hamitzarim-within-the-straits-the-three-weeks

Mental health professionals charged with compassionate care for those facing a radically changing world filled with loss have one narrow task.

Dealing With Grief, a Very Real Fear

“Ever since this COVID-19 pandemic hit, I’ve been a nervous wreck,” said a patient in a first session, by phone, of course. So, I’ll ask again, as I asked this new client filled with fear and worry, “What’s COVID-19 got to do with what you’re feeling?” And, so began his transformative journey to calm, peace, and tranquility in the face of a “coronacopia” of life upending challenges.

Helping folks understand this idea, that we are at risk for contracting COVID-19, not emotionally disturbed by the disease, opens the door to greater emotional wellbeing and healthy mental functioning. In a single session, or several (via telehealth), we can teach patients how they disturb themselves by their rigid and extreme beliefs about this-or any disease.

How? Using tools from rational emotive behavior therapy, the grandfather of cognitive behavior therapy, we teach patients to dispute, challenge, and question erroneous, irrational, self-disturbing beliefs that fill them with anxiety and sometimes so interferes with life that it essentially brings it to a crippling halt.

Rather than establish a pattern of negative emotions, we instead teach patients to reframe their thoughts in constructive ways:

• “What am I thinking that makes me feel this way?”

• “Is this thought or belief getting me anywhere positive or is it detrimental?”

• “Does thinking this help me in any way?”

• “Is what I’m thinking helping me build better relationships?”

• “Do I have any evidence, proof, to support this negative belief?”

The aim is to help patients distinguish realistic from dysfunctional thinking. Healthier thinking is a key to coping during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are some suggestions:

. “It would sure be better not to become infected with COVID-19, but who says I ‘must’ or ‘should’ not?” Of course, it’s healthy to want to be free of this, or any infection, but demanding that you not ever be ill is extreme and will lead to upset.

Replace “awfulizing” thoughts with less extreme beliefs.

 “It’s not horrible, dire, or catastrophic; it’s really just not good.” “This situation we are in is very bad, but it is not 100% negative.” Separate very bad from more than that.

Replace Low frustration tolerance (LFT) with high frustration tolerance (HFT).

 “While I don’t like it and sure wish this disease were not floating around and upending everyone’s life, I can certainly tolerate and bear it.” People can stand a great deal more than they give themselves credit for.

Eliminate negative self-other-life downing

. “While COVID-19 is not good, life surely still has lots of good in it, as do I.” “I’m a good person, even if I sometimes make myself frustrated with being quarantined.”

Shrink overgeneralizing and employ more evidence-based thinking.

 “I have no idea if it will always be this way, and in fact, it is very likely not going to last forever. Even if it does, I can handle it, though I may not like it.”

earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Chief Psychologist for Children’s Hospital of San Diego, the San Diego Police Department, and as Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD Medical School. Website: 

So begins this transformative journey to calm, peace, and tranquility in the face of a “coronacopia” of life upending challenges.

Author | Michael R. Mantell, PhD

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