Covid 19 Pandemic: A Curse or a Blessing?

The COVID 19 pandemic has brought to humanity an unexpected situation that drowned them in oceans of fear and uncertainty about their future and their health safety. Indeed, because of the imposed confinement and the increasing number of the contaminated cases, many persons have been impacted negatively and started manifesting signs of psychological distress such as insomnia, eating disorders, hallucinations, mood disorders, phobias, addictive behaviors, family Violence. The quarantine has triggered the unconscious repressed thoughts and has forced their return exposing the individuals to their deepest psychological conflicts and has weakened their defense mechanisms. Even though this difficult situation disturbed the coping strategies of the students, it offered them also the opportunity to go through the different psychological phases of the confinement starting from the survival phase till the integration one and provided them with the possibility to reorganize their personality features confronting their inner psychological troubles. The return of the repressed pushed the students out of their comfort zone and helped them with the guidance of the Office of Counseling and Disability to manage their psychological strain retrieving their darkest secrets that couldn’t be maintained anymore in their unconscious. The actual research proved that students’ perception about COVID 19 confinement is mixed. Indeed students who are performing adapted humor (self-enhancing and affiliative) are less impacted by anxiety and depressive syndrome than the ones who perform non adapted humor (Aggressive and Selfdefeating) and non-humor. In light of this, humor can be used as a diagnostic tool allowing instructors, Medical health professionals and mental health professionals to identify the adolescent’s fragilities and strengths. Humor could also be used by mental health professionals to enhance therapeutic alliance and to retrieve unconscious materials from the patient noninvasively. Indeed, Humor would guarantee, according to Bergson, the symbolic resolution of all what is "incongruous", of any inappropriate behavior. The adolescent laughs at the other, exclude the other, probably swelling his damaged narcissism.

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