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Before COVID-19, mental health might have been the least of many peoples priorities for people living on the Eastern Shore. COVID helped bring more awareness to a topic that needed to be more focused on, experts say.

“So I think what COVID did was it brought to light that we all experience mental health symptoms,” said For All Seasons President and CEO Beth Anne Dorman.

On March 13, 2020, the first Trump Administration declared a nationwide emergency. The world stopped for what many thought would only be two weeks. It turned out to be much longer.

At schools, some seniors didn’t get the chance to walk the stage or have their senior prom, which caused mental health officials in schools to be proactive on making sure students were in good spirits.

“In that first early wave, we did not have behavioral health providers working for us at Choptank,” said Chrissy Bartz, PA-C director of Community Based Programs at Choptank Community Health System.

“The therapists that were already working in the schools, they connected with those students at home as soon as they could. Fortunately with COVID came virtual and telehealth opportunities that we had never seen before in care.”

Students experienced many different mental health problems. Some students were forced to be at home every day in situations that were unhealthy. Some lost the fresh meals they received at school.

Mental health officials were forced to be proactive in student care outside of school.

“We made really conscious efforts to reach out to students that we had been seeing in the schools because for a lot of them, we’re the only resource that they have,” Bartz said.

When students started to return to school, mental health officials discovered students were having a hard time getting reacquainted with daily routines and interacting with other students.

“I think one of the things that happened right away when we got back into schools, we started to identify some of the behaviors that came with them feeling socially isolated or not having normal routines,” Bartz said. “We had a lot of kids come back really anxious because they hadn’t been in a setting like this before. They had been out of it and now needed to reacclimatized themselves.”

For adults, the shutdown meant multiple different things. According to Dorman, some patients experienced different trauma and needed more care than others. That’s why staying open was a priority for For All Seasons, she said.

“We knew that mental health was not an option to shut down,” Dorman said. “We are very much a part of the first responder healthcare line. Our major pieces were how do we keep things like the rape crisis center still moving? How do we make sure that we never closed fully? We had 25-30% of our staff in person all the time.”

“... Loneliness, grief, anxiety, depression, were all up,” Doorman said. “I think the impact was heavy on families when the time started ticking. Our brains are not programmed for unknowns. Our brains are programmed for beginnings and ends. COVID brought a lot of uncertainty.”

According to Dorman, adults struggled adapting to regular daily routines as restrictions began to lift.

The numbers for adults seeking mental health services continued to rise because now people were aware of some mental health issues they had not been before, Dorman said.

“What we saw was that there were for the first time maybe folks were starting to recognize that they were struggling,” she said. “That as they’re starting to put one foot back in front of the other, maybe they were feeling more anxiety than they’d ever felt before because now they had to step out of their home which had been comfortable in this time.”

According to Dorman, COVID showed that people all experience mental health in a different way.

“What I think COVID did was it helped us view connection differently,” she said. “It helped us to be able to bring language to some of the things that we were all experiencing. I think in some terms it talks about like leveling the playing field for mental health. Leveling the playing field in a way that we had language to put to what people were feeling.”