Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus. I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member of Johns Hopkins,

and also a former secretary of Maryland's

health department. Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand

today's news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow. If you have questions,

you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, for our Friday question and answer episode, Stephanie Desmond gets answers to your

COVID-19 mental health questions from Laura Murray, a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins.

Let's listen.

Laura Murray, thank you for joining me.

Welcome back to the show.

Thanks so much.

It's great to be here, Stephanie.

As you know, we have listener questions to ask this week about mental health.

And the first one actually is really

just for me because I don't know if our listeners know, but you live in Houston, Texas, which

is seeing a huge spike in cases almost as large, if not larger than New York City saw at its peak.

And so I'm wondering sort of what the mental health challenges are

of living in a state where cases are spiking. Yeah. It's an interesting time to be living in

Houston, Texas, for sure. You know, Stephanie, I think the best way to answer that is there are a lot

of decisions going on, both personal and professional, because we went from lockdown to really opening up to back to sort of a level one lockdown.

I think mental health effects, seeing a large rise in anxiety from some people as the threat increases, you do hear a lot that

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