What Does the 5th Year Anniversary of COVID-19 Mean to You?

This video series is taking a short break while Dr Moffic is away. For now, enjoy the rerun of this video with updated commentary.

Although the date of the 5th anniversary of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertain, in the United States it is somewhere around this time in 2020.

I have been writing and speaking about the psychological benefits of processing how COVID-19 affected our mental well-being over the years. That includes the possibility of reviewing the annual videos we did about COVID-19. Last year’s, posted on March 20, 2024, was titled “Four Years of COVID and the Weekly Video Series.” The year before was “At the 3rd Anniversary of the COVID Pandemic, Psychiatry Is Needed More Than Ever,” posted on March 10, 2023. About 2 years after the pandemic began, on March 21, 2022, “Psychiatry Can Help Us Spring Forward” included comments on COVID-19. Then, on March 24, 2021, the video “Our Readers’ Words Provide Insight into COVID Time,” included a word cloud of words that our readers used to describe the meaning of COVID-19 to them at its first anniversary.

Due to all its psychological impacts, this weekly video series began in October of 2020. The video series continues because, although the pandemic per se is in remission, milder cases of COVID-19 are still common, and our connected social psychiatric problems have continued and even escalated.

A helpful written summary about “The 5-Year Anniversary of COVID-19” was recently provided by Nidal Moukaddam on March 11, 2025. Let me suggest that chronologically going through these 5 minutes or so of videos and article (probably totaling about a half hour collectively) will stimulate memories that will be useful to process in terms of trauma, grief, and healing. As Dr Moukaddam wrote near the end of his article: “The angst brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic hopefully has a silver-lining: the appreciation of human bonds and the value of in-person, deeply human, interactions.”

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.