Maureen Gaffney: 'Our national psyche has been traumatised'

The top psychologist says we need to recognise the enormous impact the pandemic has had on our lives, with the pendulum swinging from severely restricted choices on who to see and where to go to seemingly unlimited options about work and life 

Maureen Gaffney: There are always private crises but Covid-19 was on a mass scale

On a recent rainy Monday morning, Maureen Gaffney is looking back at the intense Covid period, at the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and thinking what an extraordinary curtailment of personal freedom we all endured.

“Whoever thought we’d wake up and have to wait to hear what the guidelines were around shopping, going outside the door, how far we could go, whether we could see our friends — how many, for how long and where? It was just the most extraordinary disruption,” says the leading psychologist and author.