The circuit-breaker: how long can you hold your breath?

My brilliant daughter Shannon Paterson reports again. Here are my thoughts from the comments section.

These two-week bursts of severe restriction are called "circuit-breakers", and what they generally do is force everyone to hold their breath, figuratively speaking. But sooner or later you have to breathe again, and when normal human social impulses are kept suppressed, they tend to burst out again as people try desperately to re-connect. It's so hard-wired into us that I doubt if we can adhere to such brutal abstinence from the way we have evolved as humans. 

Besides, statistically, the circuit-breaker method is a desperation ploy which so far shows no clear signs of working. It's a fire-break against a raging blaze. Health experts are trying it, inflicting it experimentally on populations, because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO. This is all just one big seething petri dish of experimentation, worldwide, and it has never happened before so NO ONE knows what to do. But they can't say that because they need to instill trust in people so they will "believe the science". If only it were that simple!

Right now, most of us are shoving the thought to the backs of our minds that there won't be any Christmas this year - and there won't, not like we have ever known it. People are carrying around, not just resentment at what they're having to do without (human contact being the most desperate), but a lot of shame if they feel angry about it or don't want to adhere to it or feel they want to rebel. Myself, I've had wild, subversive, "wrong" thoughts that this is all a bad joke and an attempt to force people to obey and toe the line, a la Big Brother. Then I give myself a shake and say, What is wrong with you? and feel shame. So the anger gets pushed under. 

There are teeny peeps here and there, sparsely-written and infrequent news items about how some "vulnerable" people who are already in heavily-marginalized categories (chronic mental illness or addiction) are having negative emotional effects, but they are people who are going to get more depressed anyway in the winter, or are never going to get better. Then, quickly, comes another stat - we HAVE to have stats every day, you see - that suicide rates are actually DOWN, so everything is obviously OK unless you're one of "those" people (who would be messed up anyway, and we all know most of them can't be saved. Harm-reduction is the best we can do.) If these remedies turn out to be as effective as society's remedies for addiction and mental illness, then God help us all.