Introduction

Abstract

In March 2020, due to the exponential increase in the number of coronavirus cases outside China, the director of World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the outbreak could be characterized as a pandemic. Having now taken the lives of approximately 5.8 million people just two years after that announcement, the COVID-19 pandemic is still causing physical and mental suffering across the globe. If the ongoing pandemic has exposed one thing over the past two years, it is our vulnerability to pain; not only to physical pain but also to psychological pain. It has exposed the fact that all humans, regardless of their sex, race, class, or their social, political, and economic status, are susceptible to conditions like anxiety and depression. As established by recent cross-disciplinary research, since the beginning of the pandemic the number of people suffering from depression and anxiety has been continually on the rise across different continents (Rudenstine et al. 2020; Twenge and Joiner 2020; Özdin and Özdin 2020; Palgi et al. 2020; Alyami et al. 2020; Choi et al. 2020; Dozois 2021). Although the increasing pervasiveness of depression and anxiety is a present-day phenomenon, mental disorders are nothing new. They were described and treated in ancient Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC (Nejat and Rhea 1998). Being oblivious to their causes and roots, Mesopotamians would consider mental disorders as “hands” of specific deities taking control over a person, thus deeming them as metaphysical interventions in one’s mind. While one particular condition was known as “hand of Ishtar,” another one was known as “hand of Shamash” (Black and Green 1992, 102).