Paper short abstract:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, distorted temporality is the foundation of mental suffering. Through precariousness, people experience anxiety or despair because they lose intersubjective reference of time. Such disturbance is exacerbated by trauma, isolation, and disconnection through the pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I exam a few case studies both in Wuhan and overseas during the Covid-19 Pandemic. From a phenomenological perspective, I pay special attention to people's bodily and emotional experience. I analyzed their lived experience and found that the pattern of emotional melt-down by anchoring people's altered experience of time. Three characters stood out across case studies and interweavingly influenced people's mental status. First, transgenerational trauma caused great difficulties for these people to focus on the here and now. Instead, because of their past traumatic experience, they could not help but overwhelmed by obsessive thoughts about the future. Second, when people perceived their solidary situation and could not make real-life interactions or connections, they lose the reference of time and space, which result in a distorted sense of intersubjectivity. This perceived isolation and lacking effective social support causes somatic reactions such as suffocating, pain, cramps, insomnia or lethargy; as well as psychological reactions such as fear, panic, and despair. Third, one underlying emotion behind the distress and suffering people experienced during the pandemic was a sense of helplessness. This would cause people to have a strong sense of helplessness, which in turn exacerbated the previous two conditions, perceived isolation and obsessive orientation towards the future. Based on these observation and co-experiences, I found the most helpful way to go through distorted temporality is to establish meaningful social relations, re-create intersubjectivity and intercorporeality.