Psychiatry for Better World: COVID-19 and Blame Games People Play from Public and Global Metal Health Perspective.

Blame games tend to follow crisis, be they at local, national or international level related to political, financial or health issues. COVID-19 crisis from the very beginning has been followed by divisive and disruptive psychosocial and political blame games. Active or passive blaming is an inherent feature of human beings in order to shift responsibilities onto others, single out a culprit, find a scapegoat and pinpoint a target. Finger pointing, blame games and scapegoating are associated with creation of binaries that identify agency as good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral. The scapegoat is expectedly always bad, wrong and immoral, commonly black evil. The detrimental effects of the COVID-19 blame games are seen in a lack of cohesion and coherence in the anti-COVID-19 solving strategies. Fighting the COVID-19 crisis all countries and nations need to join efforts on defeating it and to shift from a destructive blaming and zero-sum type of thinking to a much more creative, systemic and humanistic type. Effective response to COVID-19 is related to sowing the seeds for humanistic self and empathic civilization, rather than blaming, scapegoating and xenophobia.

COVID-19 Infodemic and Public Trust from the Perspective of Public and Global Mental Health.

Crisis usually involves participants who trust and distrust each other, commonly in the same time. COVID-19 infodemic induced confidence crisis and distrust in authorities, science communities, governments and institutions can lead to harmful health behaviors and ill mental health and become a serious threat to public and global mental health as another kind of virus. Distrust mentality, conspiracy thinking and blame games may have detrimental effects not just on the individual level, but on the level of the whole groups, communities and global world. Public distrust and mistrust are related to the crisis in the domain of social and political relations, not only on the same country level, but also between different countries at regional or global level. Dynamics between public trust and mental health is a complex and bidirectional, ill mental health is causing and enhancing the inclination to confidence crisis, distrust, conspiracy theories and blame games and vice versa confidence crisis, distrust, conspiracy thinking and blame games are leading to ill mental health. It is important to have a holistic transdisciplinary integrative understanding of these dynamics and science-based treatment and prevention.