COVID-19 pandemic | Collective upheaval, collective solutions

For almost two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has required continuous adaptation from individuals, businesses and institutions. The closure of non-essential establishments, the ban on gatherings in homes and the adoption of new behaviors such as wearing a mask, mass vaccination and teleworking have upset our daily lives. This is why the pandemic can be characterized as a dramatic social change, or more simply, a “collective upheaval”.

Roxane de la Sablonniere
Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, and six other signatories*

In our conversations and in the media, mental health, pandemic fatigue, anxiety, depression and anger are often discussed. Experiencing erratic emotions and changes for such a long period has weakened the psychological health of the population.

And resilience in all of this?

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity. It is often perceived as a strictly individual challenge, whereas it can also be collective.

Just as a country can rebuild after a devastating hurricane, a community can recover more easily from a pandemic if it favors targeted solutions that concretely meet the needs of different population groups.

To do this, you need to know how to take a step back, allow yourself some time to reflect, in order to rethink our values, our speeches, our interventions, according to the issues that have arisen during the crisis. This effort is all the more important as this is probably not the last crisis we will experience. Because it is clear that we were not ready to face a social crisis of this magnitude.

Community response

In order to relieve the psychological distress of the population, we could be tempted to mainly favor initiatives such as access to individual therapy or to a telephone or online resource. However, community intervention could be more advantageous and less costly in a crisis context. What was implemented in response to the Lac-Mégantic tragedy could, for example, inspire us. Moreover, a recent review of the literature reports the effectiveness of community interventions on well-being and resilience in many social contexts (Montiel et al., 2021).

If we want to permanently repair the psychological and social damage caused by this pandemic and better prepare ourselves for the future, it would be desirable to go beyond solutions centered exclusively on the individual, which demonstrate their limits when a crisis affects all spheres of society. Citizens could, for example, be directly mobilized to increase the well-being of their community.

The valorization of collective solutions to a collective upheaval could be articulated in three axes.

1. Take inspiration from collective solutions that have been successfully implemented to strengthen the resilience of a community, by promoting mutual aid and consolidating the social fabric.
2. Prepare, organize and diversify the offer according to the populations and work in close collaboration with the workers in the field, in order to co-construct an intervention program adapted to the groups served.
3. Use the sophisticated methodological, technological and statistical tools at our disposal to rigorously test and validate programs based on evidence.

Together, let’s move towards collective resilience.

*Co-signers: Eloise Cotea master’s student in psychology at the Université de Montréal; Melissa Genereuxmedical specialist in public health and preventive medicine and associate professor in the department of community health sciences of the faculty of medicine and health sciences of the University of Sherbrooke; Janie HouleFull Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal; Eric LacourseFull Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Montreal; France-Landryeducational psychologist and associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal; caroline lebeaudirector and founder of the Tournée édu4tive and Regard9.