The Doctor-Public Relationship: How Physicians Can Communicate to Foster Resilience and Promote Mental Health During COVID-19

Excerpt

As physicians, we are traditionally taught to diagnose and treat one patient at a time. The doctor-patient relationship, that empathic alliance at the heart of medicine, reflects our abiding commitment to caring for individual patients who are suffering. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, suffering is occurring on a massive scale that threatens to overwhelm the “one patient at a time” approach. Previous large-scale national disasters, potentially less impactful than COVID-19, resulted in significant mental health costs to society.¹ This suggests that the mental health “footprint” of the current pandemic will be far-reaching and long-lasting, and that proactive, preventive public health measures must be taken to address the rapidly evolving, ongoing, and future mental health effects of COVID-19.² …