COVID-19 and Beyond: Psychological, Existential, and Therapeutic Perspectives on Mental Health and Meaning
Joel Vos, Pninit Russo-Netzer & Stefan Schulenberg (Eds.), University Professors Press, 2026.
The pandemic didn’t just disrupt our routines — it cracked open the existential foundations of how we live, work, grieve, and connect. COVID-19 and Beyond gathers leading voices in existential, humanistic, and positive psychology to ask the questions that outlasted the lockdowns: How do people find meaning under prolonged threat? Why did some of us emerge more anxious, others more resilient, and a few unexpectedly transformed? What did frontline healthcare workers, isolated elders, and a generation of children carry forward when the world reopened?
Drawing on frameworks from Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy to Terror Management Theory, Self-Determination Theory, and post-traumatic growth research—and introducing a striking new typology of nine “lockdown-animal” coping styles—the contributors weave clinical insight, empirical data, and lived experience into a portrait of human response to collective crisis. Chapters address anxiety and depression, moral injury among caregivers, the search for meaning in suffering, family and community resilience, and the long shadow the pandemic continues to cast on mental health systems worldwide.
This is more than a record of what we endured. It is a roadmap for what comes next—for clinicians rebuilding practice, researchers charting the post-pandemic landscape, students entering the helping professions, and any reader still making sense of the years that changed us.
A timely, hopeful, and unflinching look at the psychology of crisis—and what it reveals about being human.
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