Quarantine rules, workplace relationships and mental health among subjects of discussion at the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival
- At the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival, psychologists will discuss the impact on mental health of the world’s longest hotel quarantine
- Other discussions will cover the role that family plays in mental health, as well as how we re-enact our early childhood experiences in the workplace
Recovery, resilience and mental health are the key themes of this year’s Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Festival director Catherine Platt, a veteran of the city’s gruelling three-week hotel quarantine, says the “Rebound Edition” will tap into the therapeutic power of storytelling.
“We wanted to reflect on the shared challenges of the pandemic, as well as the ways people survive and thrive in difficult times. And books are therapy – a comfort, resource and means of escape – so mental health is the perfect theme for a literary festival,” says Platt, who has done coronavirus quarantine three times in Hong Kong.
Her mother locks her up in the third trimester of her pregnancy in their housing-commission flat for 100 days, to protect her from the outside world – and make sure she can’t get into any more trouble. The teenager becomes very bored and depressed.
“You don’t hear any voices except for the television and the voices inside your head. Your whole world revolves around your mother or the parent in charge and you can conflate love with control, funny emotions arise like guilt and sometimes you hate your parents,” says Pung.
Similar situations are still playing out in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Today, the women are not just from Asia, but also Africa. It’s always the girls who are locked up while their brothers are allowed to roam free. Pung said she wanted to explore the threshold between childhood and adulthood.
“If a parent controls every aspect of your life, including what you eat when you’re pregnant, what happens when you are legally an adult? How do they relinquish that control?” she says.
Anyone working in an office will be fascinated to hear what business psychotherapist Naomi Shragai has to say. Her recently released book The Man Who Mistook His Job for His Life: How to Thrive at Work by Leaving Your Emotional Baggage Behind explores how we re-enact our early childhood experiences in the workplace.
Our early lives create a template for how we perceive all subsequent relationships. Many of us will be familiar with this notion in terms of intimate relationships, but it also applies to the office.
There are two realities being played out – that of the actual workplace and then the personal dramas that are happening internally, our perception of events, which can be much more powerful than reality – and when they collide confusion can result.
“It can have serious consequences. We’re all human and bump up against each other and get things wrong, but it’s a matter of degrees. If one is seriously distorting, it will affect decisions in the workplace and these dynamics deeply affect what happens in a company,” says Shragai.
Blaine’s peer-reviewed journal article looked into the psychosocial impact of the mandatory quarantine. “The research has shown that anything after 10 days [quarantine] then the mental health consequences are much higher,” says Blaine.
“A lot of people said it was trauma, a punishment, and some said they actually blanked out; it was so traumatic that they couldn’t recall even what they were doing during the period. And a lot of them came out psychologically scarred and weren’t able to integrate into society easily,” says Blaine.
She says the lack of openness and transparency around the scientific basis for a three-week quarantine, as well as a lack of trust in the authorities, created many of the adverse psychological effects. At the end of this discussion, there will be a chance for people to speak openly about their quarantine experiences with a panel of psychologists and psychiatrists, and to stir up public debate about this hot issue.
