As the region counts the many costs of coronavirus, one leading organisation has called for mental health to be included in employment packages as staff bear the brunt of the global pandemic.

Among the many people contacting The Lighthouse Arabia for help since the onset of the global pandemic have been working mothers, where the job of online learning has fallen upon them; adolescents starved of the company of friends and spending too much time on social media and computer games; and those in the corporate world, concerned about the health and wellbeing of employees, with telephone calls taken from HR managers and team managers.

Dr. Saliha Afridi, clinical psychologist, who has been in the region for 11 years and co-founded The Lighthouse Arabia nine years ago, wants one of the legacies of the current crisis will see companies sit up and recognise the importance of looking after the mental health of employees.

She told Arabian Business: “What I hope to see as a result of all of this, as we come out of this, is a lot more companies looking into coverage for mental health because right now mental health is not something that is covered, and so when employees are really under a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, a lot of burnout, they can’t afford necessarily to go to mental health.

“What companies end up having to do is they’re now paying for us to be on-site, to take care of their employees, but maybe in the long-run they might actually consider mental health coverage.”

From lockdowns and curfews, redundancies, reduced hours, working from home, distance learning, social distancing, health fears for individuals, family and friends – arguably everyone has taken a ride on the much-talked about ‘Corona-coaster’.

But while some have been able to weather the storm, for others the pressures associated with the coronavirus global pandemic has become too much.

For Dr. Afridi it has meant five years’ worth of work to tackle mental health issues in the Middle East has been completed in the last five months.

“We moved maybe half a decade in five months. We’ve seen five years of progress,” she said.

“The Lighthouse has always been busy and I like to tell people that, for me, it wasn’t ‘Oh my God, our phones are ringing off the hook’. We were in a mental health crisis before coronavirus. What coronavirus did was just amplify a lot of things for many people. But we were already in a crisis before that,” she added.

As a prime example of this amplification, Dr Afridi revealed that the intensity of the issues she has witnessed has increased “probably twice-fold” since the virus took hold.

“Where somebody might be coming in at a 50 percent, or five, now people are showing up at 10 and they’ve gone from zero to ten very quickly. Everyone is on edge, but definitely there has been an increase in people’s symptoms,” she said.

Dr Laila Mahmoud, specialist psychiatry, Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres, told Arabian Business, that the majority of cases they were seeing are of seniors and adolescents, “as they are struggling more to cope.

“Seniors come more with anxiety, while adolescents come with agitated depression or severe anxiety, panic attacks and disorders,” she said.

According to the second edition of Cigna’s 2020 Covid-19 Global Impact Study, while the UAE witnessed an improvement in overall well-being employees indicate that they continue to experience work-related stress as they work longer hours and over weekends.

Sixty-four percent of the employees surveyed mentioned that they work on weekends, a significant increase from 57 percent in April 2020. While 97 percent surveyed in May-June reported being stressed, a significant rise from 90 percent in April. Encouragingly, among those under stress, 83 percent found their stress to be manageable compared to 74 percent in April.

Dr Afridi admitted that working from home was taking its toll on some. She said: “Our home was our safe place, it was our place for rest and recreation and leisure and entertainment. This is where we just come and relax. But now our home is no longer that. So I think a lot of people are feeling a little bit homeless. They feel as if their home was taken away from them because now I look over and I see my office right there.

“There can be increased levels of burnout because of that, because you don’t get any distance from the place you work.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), declared that for this year's World Mental Health Day, which falls on October 10, the WHO, together with its partner organisations, United for Global Mental Health and the World Federation for Mental Health, would call for a massive scale-up in investments in mental health.