Building bridges: A joint reflection between a COVID-cautious psychology lecturer and a psychology student and aspiring clinical psychologist
The COVID-cautious lecturer (Aspa): I lead a module for the Cognitive Psychology module (second year, undergraduate). This year I would deliver the introductory lecture. I am COVID-cautious, I always wear a mask at work, including when I lecture. In the previous years, I didn’t include anything about COVID-19 in my teaching material. This year I decided to change that. I talked about the effect of COVID-19 on cognitive function, the importance of clean indoor air, the importance of metacognitive reflection to help us reduce cognitive biases and become better psychologists, medical practitioners – better humans. I related all this to UN’s sustainable development goals, and the recent clean indoor air pledge.
As one of the employability leads (i.e. someone that tries to help students think of their employment options in relation to what they are studying), I always like to include optional writing and publishing opportunities for our students. I gave them 3 suggestions: they could write reflexive articles about 1) climate 2) AI and/or 3) COVID-19. Given that semester 1 of the second year is such a difficult semester, I expected that very few students would take up the opportunity, and that no one would want to write about COVID-19.
The only person that sent me anything was Harry. He very quickly wrote a paper on Long COVID. I was impressed on so many counts! First of all, that he chose to write about COVID-19. Secondly, that he put a lot of effort into it and approached it with such compassion and thoughtfulness. Harry is not COVID-cautious, but I think he is a COVID-cautious ally. I think he is listening to COVID-cautious people and he will do his best to provide support to COVID-cautious people and Long COVID patients. We kept working on the article, and it provided a platform to exchange ideas and understand each other’s point of view.
Psychology student and aspiring clinical psychologist (Harry):
How five years after the COVID-19 pandemic started, Long COVID has encouraged my dreams of becoming a clinical psychologist.
COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020 (Cucinotta et Vanelli, 2020). Half a decade later, and COVID-19 rules have significantly relaxed, with fewer news stories about infections and deaths from COVID-19, and only a minority are wearing masks and following COVID-19 rules from the pandemic to keep themselves and others safe. One of the side effects of repeatedly contracting COVID-19 is Long COVID. Long COVID is a chronic condition that occurs after infection of COVID-19 and is present for a minimum period of three months as a continuous disease state that affects one or more organs (Di Toro et al.,2021; Ely et al, 2024).
Some of the common symptoms of Long COVID include cognitive impairment, anxiety and memory loss (Aiyegbusi et al,2021). Cognitive impairments (Roy, 2013) are defined as problems people have with cognitive processes such as attention, memory and comprehension. This means that patients suffering from Long COVID are more likely than not to suffer from poor memory retention. This means that patients might forget more and might not be able to comprehend as much information as someone without Long COVID. Evidence from a meta-analysis of studies suggests that there is a link between Long COVID and cognitive impairment. (Ceban et al, 2022). This illustrates that the link between COVID-19 infections and cognitive impairment is common enough to warrant a question on how COVID-19 can affect our brain function and whether we should wear masks more indoors in crowded places.
Having a life-long, life-changing condition such as Long COVID can be a source of anxiety. Anxiety (Chand et Raman, 2023) is a prospective mood state that is composed of a complex cognitive, physiological and behavioral response system associated with planning for awaited events seen as threatening. A meta-analysis (Seighali et al., 2024) found that the prevalence of depression and anxiety among patients suffering from Long COVID was estimated to be twenty-three percent, based on data from one hundred and forty-three studies. This demonstrates that anxiety has potential links to COVID-19. However, these findings are only correlational. Anxiety in Long COVID could also be part of the emotional and cognitive changes due to the effect of COVID-19 on the brain and body (Özçelik et al., 2025; Rocha et al., 2025), although it must be difficult to separate that from anxiety caused by the difficulty of managing the disease, the fact that masking is not taken seriously by those closest to them, or the difficulty of trying not to catch COVID-19 repeatedly. COVID-19 can create a level of anxiety, as it is an ambiguous threat which activates anxiety significantly more than fear. Managing COVID-19 requires prolonged coping mechanisms compared to immediate defense mechanisms (Coelho et al, 2020).
The evidence on Long COVID, cognitive impairments and anxiety will inform my career aspirations. I would like to become a clinical psychologist, and the findings in relation to Long COVID will help to inform my practice. I am concerned about the silence around COVID-19 in traditional media and professional spaces, and I would like to address it as a clinical psychology professional.
Moreover, I would like to support people with Long COVID as well as COVID-cautious people who still wear masks due to the virus still being prevalent. Being a lone masker can be challenging to deal with psychologically; I think people that continue to mask should be supported to continue masking, given that they are doing something for their own benefit and for the benefit of others.
Di Toro et al (2021) highlights the uncertainty around Long COVID, and because of Long COVID’s devastating effects on people, I would like to offer psychological support to Long COVID patients and their families and friends, so they are able to deal with their difficult reality. Becoming a clinical psychologist would help me to diagnose people and get them the treatment they need to help them from a psychological point of view. Moreover, being able to conduct research on Long COVID to raise awareness of its devastating effects alongside my role as a clinical psychologist would hopefully be beneficial in giving more representation to the patients. I would also like to make sure psychological interventions are not used to harm patients in any way, as CBT was used in relation to ME (Shepherd, 2016).
This article has been written to help raise awareness for people living with Long COVID and people who wear masks, because these two sections of our population are underrepresented within our media. This article isn’t to shame anyone for not masking; it’s to raise awareness and to show support to people in our lives who may mask or who have Long COVID. So, let’s show our support and remember to always be kind, because that’s the best thing we can do for the people around us.
Aspa’s response: I am very grateful for Harry’s thoughtfulness on Long COVID and mask wearing. Anxiety is a tricky notion to approach when it comes to Long COVID, because Long COVID patients have been told that they are just anxious and everything is in their head, but I thought you approached it very thoughtfully. The other thing I wanted to add is that multi-disciplinary collaboration is very important when it comes to Long COVID, so it is definitely worth thinking about how you will approach collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team. But all in all, I feel this is a future psychologist that is compassionate, is listening, and is taking Long COVID seriously, and that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
The authors did not use AI in the writing of this article.
Reference list:
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