While Covid-19 has posed enormous medical and public health challenges for a low income country like Pakistan, the mental health impact of the illness has so far received little attention. Mental health professionals have been warning people for months about the impending tsunami of infection and stress related conditions that are already mushrooming all over the country.

When the national lockdown was imposed, schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces were all shut down simultaneously in an effort to control the spread of the infection. For the first time in recent history, families found themselves locked inside their homes for an extended period of time with no clear indication of when things would go back to 'normal'.

With three teenage children and two elderly parents, in addition to my wife and myself, my house suddenly became an interesting 'laboratory' in which to observe, at close quarters, what happens when people in 2020 are forcibly confined together with no indication of when the confinement might end.

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