WHEN the Pan American Health Organization said last week it had found that the pandemic toll on doctors, nurses and other front-line health workers had meant more patients, longer working hours and higher rates of COVID-19 infection, it was unknowingly talking about Jamaica’s Dr Wendel Abel.

“I have been practising medicine for almost 40 years – 30 as a psychiatrist – and I have never had to work as hard as I have in the past two years. Just the demand,” the veteran consultant psychiatrist admitted to the Jamaica Observer.

“It has been the most demanding in terms of my career,” said Abel, a professor of mental health policy and head of the Department of Community Health and Psychiatry at The University of the West Indies, Mona in St Andrew.

With the two-year anniversary of the first case of COVID-19 in the island just under a month away, Professor Abel called attention to the “almost abnormal levels of depression” amongst Jamaicans brought on by pandemic-related strictures.

He described the cases he had largely been seeing as “depression, depression, depression, depression”.

“It’s like you walking in mango bush, depression just dropping like ripe mango,” he said, noting, however, that while the levels of depression and anxiety were concerning, there had been, thankfully, no corresponding increase in suicides.

“We are seeing people reporting higher anxiety levels. There is a massive surge in people who are depressed and also people reporting suicidal ideations but no increase in deaths by suicide in Jamaica, and this is also true elsewhere,” Professor Abel stated.

He cited an August 2020 study conducted just months after the pandemic hit showing that 97 per cent of individuals surveyed felt they needed psychosocial support at that time, with 55 per cent reporting anxiety symptoms and the remainder depressive symptoms.

Jamaica’s suicide rate is approximately 2.1 per 100,000, or between 47 and 56 deaths per year, according to Jamaica Constabulary Force figures.

While the number of suicides in Jamaica increased by nearly a fifth in 2021 compared to the previous year, the rate was still behind pre-pandemic levels. In 2019 Jamaica reported 58 suicides, down from 60 in 2018.

In the meantime, Professor Abel said several front-line worker groups such as medical personnel have been presenting with burnout symptoms as the pandemic drags on.

“Another group that has been impacted greatly is working mothers who have had to be supervising children, teaching themselves to teach their children, while at the same time taking care of their families. A lot of these working mothers are burnt out; I am seeing them, they are coming to me,” he said.

“It’s not just burnout but also COVID fatigue, what we also call compassion fatigue,” the medic explained, noting that the symptoms which include problems sleeping, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating, and lack of motivation were similar to the signs of depression.

Said Professor Abel: “It is just important for persons to recognise, and when they do that they should reach out for support and help.”

According to figures obtained from the Ministry of Health, up to last Friday there had been a total of 126,886 confirmed cases of the virus and 2,738 related deaths overall since March of 2020.