Anti section COVID-19 is expected to add anxiety to citizens

It has been nearly nine months since Kosovo is facing this pandemic. Institutions have decided from last night to ten municipalities to start hours of police time, as a result of increasing the number of cases with the virus.

The director of the Mental Health Centre in Pristina, Sami Rexhepi, in an interview for Kosova Preress, stressed that it is the last moment of awareness, since Kosovo unfortunately has a fragile health system.

The biggest problem is that, in the first place, the awareness of decision-makers is even more responsible for the actions they take. I'm not against the masses, but I had to work forward. That this is not the number that came at once, but has gradually increased. Conscious of the people who are responsible for both these necessary measures and as a protection for the population. We don't have it, we haven't prepared it. But such measures are being taken more as penalties, that they are not respected will follow a sentence, or a punishment for disrespecting the measures. This increases the scale of the rebellion”, Rexhepi points out.

According to him, the biggest responsibility for awareness is health institutions, so that measures will reflect as protective, not as punitive. Rexhepi says that before such measures are established, mental health experts should consult.

I don't want to believe that no mental - health professionals have been consulted. We're running like firemen. When the number is growing, we're sending a tank even if we turn off a fire, or we're trying to put out a fire. We're not working on a fire. New measures, if field experts have estimated necessary, mental health experts need these measures to present the population as necessary and necessary, not punishment. Because administrative measures are always punitive”, Rexhepi adds to Kosovas.

Neuropsikiatri, Sami Rexhepi, tells Kosovo that unfortunately these measures will increase anxiety, since the limits of citizens' patience have been affected.

This will increase anxiety even more. From stress we've managed to create in the population a communicative nightmare, that it hasn't been a stress that's gone through. We've gone from stress to stress. That's why even when the pandemic passes I expect the response to the mental health of the population. Because the limits of patience have been affected, the threshold of tolerance has been exceeded. This has been reflected from the start with the growing domestic violence”, he says.

In addition, Rexhepi stresses that the chronic cases that now and how long they take services at this centre have begun to re-acrash. He has expressed concern that the situation will deteriorate and that the health system is not sufficiently prepared.

The chronic currents we have in the center are starting to re-accumber because we're talking about a period of almost nine months, with numbers down and over again. But when it's over 300, we need to understand that there's been an alarm entering the red area on a very high level of risk. The large risk rate is not only the number, this risk and much more increase the Kosovo health system, which is not fully formed. We are in the upper form of the health system, which is very fragile. Will this health system also have capacity to cope with these numbers? I wouldn't want it to happen, but imagine an anesthesiologist who's in intensive care and intensive care, if he's going to choose which of the patients to put into the respiratory system, not. It's like punishing a doctor who needs to be stripped of the human part of his mission to death. We don't need to come up here”, Rexhepi says.

The director of the Mental Health Centre in Pristina suggests that during pandemic time the number of cases that have required service has increased as a result of showing anxiety, stress and insomnia.

The number has grown quite a lot, even though we as an institution don't have the ambulance service to offer to all the citizens because we don't actually have the capacity. But, however, we haven't refused cases, the number has increased greatly. Anxiety is too great, fear is too great. Which shows that the pandemic as a stressful one has produced a huge effect. And it is bad that this fear is also becoming more and more”, he points out.

Besides, Rexhepi stresses that predictions are that there will be post-traumatic stress for a long time and if the country returns to normality, people will not be willing to start work because of their poor mental health state.