Psychology professors Tedd McDonald and Mary Pritchard were featured in the Idaho Press article, “Feeling anxious? Fearful? Depressed? Don’t worry, it’s the new normal.”
“If you’re struggling right now – that’s normalcy,” McDonald said in the piece. “That’s most of us. We have no history with this – and that makes it scarier and more depressing.”
“A lot of our students and faculty feel unmotivated right now,” said Pritchard. “They say: There are days I can function well – other days I can’t get off the couch. It’s a huge psychological impact,” she said. “This has a lot more of the feel of a natural disaster and the young people – they don’t remember 9/11 or H1N1… For some reason we are panicked on a societal level we’ve never seen.”