MENTAL ILLNESS GOES VIRAL

announced a nationwide lockdown on March 24, Preeti Borkar* barely got out of bed. The 46-year-old Mumbai-based English teacher didn’t want to eat or speak. “Ever since I heard that COVID-19 had reached India, I started getting panic attacks. It was getting difficult for me to breathe, and that being a COVID symptom, I thought I had contracted it,” she says. “I kept thinking of what would happen if one of my family members contracted the virus; that we would be dumped in some hospital on a dirty bed and I would be left all alone to die.” Soon enough, she imagined she had fever and a sore throat. Having been in therapy since