Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Online Mental Health Care (Recorded 4/24/20) | Pri-Med
Posted by Dr. Vollmer on April 27, 2020
In this podcast, psychiatrist Dr. Shirah Vollmer will explore the unique aspects of referring patients to online psychiatry. She will weigh the potential advantages and disadvantages of mental health care moving to an online platform and discuss techniques for providing online mental health care.
Please note that any data, indications, and guidelines presented in this activity are current as of the recording on 04/27/2020 and they are subject to change as new information is published.
— Read on www.pri-med.com/online-education/podcast/covid-19-mental-health-6
Shirah Vollmer MD 
Shelly Tannenbaum said
Great podcast, Shirah. I believe that the world has embraced health-care providers and we never can thank you / them enough for giving of yourselves the way that you do. It is true, though, that you providers lose innumerable patients to this horrible disease after fighting so hard to keep them alive. Is there really a feeling amongst health-care providers that they didn’t do enough, that they could have done more, that if they had just done this one more thing, that their patients might have lived? Is there guilt? Covid-19 is a destructive, horrid disease that once it has someone in its grips, it is a miracle if a patient survives. Where I work, I think providers do their best to keep the patients alive. If not, they go home, and come back another day. You’re right that providers need to grieve, but perhaps our providers know the true nature of the disease. Of course support of our providers is always necessary, and they grieve for those who pass away. But one also needs to know one’s enemy, right?
Dr. Vollmer said
Well….I am sure you saw that the E.R. doctor in NY committed suicide yesterday. Of course, we will never know why, but how could it possibly be unrelated to the Covid crisis? Feelings do not make sense, and so feeling like a failure, as a health care provider, surpasses logic, and yet, the patient dies and they are trying to save them, so in that way feeling like a failure may follow, as does feeling like a hero when a patient lives, and of course, both ways involve factors both in and out of the control of the provider. False attribution, of course, but we are all trying to make sense of a world that is so random. It is a tough time.