![]() The country remained a so-called “neutral ally”-external pressures made it a British sympathizer, but the kingdom stopped short of active military involvement. But the Norwegians’ mental health in the 1920s is unlikely to have been so significantly affected by the war. Norway’s data on suicides follows a pattern similar to the US. The Scandinavian country, which excelled in data collection even in the early 20th century, offers important insight when it comes to the effects of the pandemic on mental health-because it didn’t fight in World War I. Although past studies have shown a connection between the flu pandemic and the increase of suicides in the US, independently from the war’s long tail, the war’s influence still makes it somewhat difficult to compare the US situation post covid-19 to that of the US post influenza pandemic. Unlike the pandemic, the war had been lived as a collective tragedy, says Eicher, and the trauma was still showing its impact. Perhaps most importantly, the pandemic hit at the end of World War I, which had already killed 20 million people worldwide and wounded as many. ![]() This was especially true in Europe, where people often dealt with waves of influenza without realizing it was a pandemic, says John Eicher, a professor of modern European history who is conducting research on a body of about 1,000 letters written by survivors of the 1918-1920 pandemic. At the time, a larger percentage of the population was rural, and most people weren’t receiving news about influenza outbreaks that didn’t affect them directly. ![]() Further, people lived the influenza epidemic as a personal tragedy, without being aware of a global narrative akin to the one that has accompanied covid-19 since its beginning.
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