Psychiatry for better world: Covid-19 and blame games people play from public and global metal health perspective

Abstract

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.