What coronavirus fears are doing to people with anxiety disorders

By Bonnie Berkowitz

A traumatized veteran’s combat dreams are more vivid than they have been in years.

A little girl can’t concentrate at school, terrified that her grandparents will get infected with coronavirus and die.

A person who had stopped obsessively washing his hands regresses amid a barrage of public-service messages ordering him to do exactly that.

For some of the millions of Americans with post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder or other forms of debilitating anxiety, coronavirus is a growing mental health threat.

“It started as soon as the news that there was a new thing in the environment hit — a new virus,” said Shane G. Owens, a psychologist in Long Island, who specializes in treating anxiety. “They came in almost immediately feeling the false alarms of this and starting to see things in the environment that they saw as threatening.” Read the full story at The Washington Post.