Promoting the Resilience of the Italian Population Against SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, due to its exceptional level of impact on the populations of the richest and most technologically advanced nations—which are experiencing unprecedented widespread mortality, fear, and social isolation—and due to the considerable difficulties faced by health services in coping with the emergency and the uncertainty regarding the evolution of the pandemic and its foreseeable heavy economic repercussions on a global scale, requires a change in the approach to the prevention and treatment of the infection based on the integration of biomedical and psychological sciences and professions. A survey of the Italian pandemic population, the results of which we report here, shows a widespread state of psychological distress, which, based on decades of scientific and clinical evidence on the relationship between mental states and immune system efficiency that we summarize in this paper, plausibly weakens the resistance of individuals and the population to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Italy can deploy a great force, represented by tens of thousands of psychologists and psychotherapists, who, as health workers, could be employed, alongside local and hospital medicine, in primary care and in promoting the resilience of citizens and health workers themselves, who are subject to a deadly work stress that also includes a widespread threat to their lives.

Psychic Life-Biological Molecule Bidirectional Relationship: Pathways, Mechanisms, and Consequences for Medical and Psychological Sciences—A Narrative Review

“…Therefore, it can be assumed that psychological interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic not only relieve psychic suffering, but can significantly contribute to immunological resistance against SARS-CoV-2 infection diffusion and to the population’s resilience possibilities [ 143 ].…”

Coping space transformation at different levels of university training during the pandemic and the assessment of its integral indicators

“…The impact of the pandemic on mental health is top of the research agenda in various regions of the world (Bottaccioli, Lazzari, Bottaccioli 2021;Cao, Zuo, Li et al 2020;Dagnino, Anguita, Escobar, Cifuentes 2020;dos Santos, Pico-Perez, Morgado 2020;Giallonardo, Sampogna, Del Vecchio et al 2020;Majeed, Schwaiger, Nazim, Samue 2021;Schudy, Zurek, Wisniewska et al 2020;Thomas, Barbato, Verlinden et al 2020;Wang, Chudzicka-Czupala, Grabowski et al 2020).…”