By Ray Wilson
In a July 2020 CNBC interview, Klaus Schwab remarked: “So we will see definitively a lot of anger already now, but probably increase by the end of the year because this crisis will be with us until we really have found a remedy.” He paused only briefly before adding: “So we have to prepare for a more angry world.”
In context, he was speaking about the economic shockwaves of COVID-19—the lockdowns; new social norms; sudden unemployment; the fracturing of family and livelihoods; and the social strain that follows when systems stop absorbing pressure. His argument was not abstract provocation but a warning framed in policy language: disruption breeds frustration, and frustration, if left unmanaged, spills into the public square. Governments, he suggested, would need to respond by rebuilding toward something more equitable and inclusive.
This story, however, is not about speeches or policy rooms.
It is about Willow Crescent and Forge Acre. It is about the people who live there.
Willow Crescent and Forge Acre are fictional places on paper, but the events that echo through them are not entirely imagined. They are drawn from real moments—real conversations, real ruptures. I once thought what happened there would be isolated, contained. It wasn’t. Correlation is not causation; that much is true, but patterns repeat often enough that they begin to feel like something heavier than coincidence. These things happened—to family, to friends, to people who once moved through life with easy familiarity and now do not.
In Willow Crescent a chainsaw wind blows through the trees, leaving a hollow feeling in its wake.
“What’s the matter with Doug?” asks Basil, carrying a small chainsaw in his hands.
“I really don’t know; perhaps he is ill or something.” I pause. “Who knows what people have to contend with?”
“Didn’t want to upset him, you know, cutting overhanging branches off of his favourite tree,” Basil says with a sigh.
There had been talk—nothing concrete, just the kind of rumours that circulate more freely after 2020, when everyone seemed slightly altered from who they had been before.
“Well, Doug has got the serious hump about something; he never has a good word to say about anything or anyone. He is suspicious and confrontational, sparring for a fight.”
“I know Basil; he’s got a bee in his bonnet about boundaries and overhanging branches – remember those three weeks after the Great Storm?”
“I do.”
Basil’s expression shifts as memory returns, not sharply, but like weather moving in slowly over old ground.
“Doug was the man with the chainsaw, and Cecilia, his wife, helped prepare meals for neighbours because all the power had gone down and they didn’t have gas and they couldn’t cook things. It was like a war spirit had descended, and we all helped one another.”
There is a pause that holds more weight than words.
“Something split some of us apart in 2020, but it also brought some of us closer together,” Basil muses, his eyes reflecting a mix of nostalgia and sadness. “I hope we can find that sense of unity again someday.”
A few miles from Willow Crescent lies Forge Acre. My son and his wife live there now, on a small stretch of land edged by farmland. They have their girls, a dog, a cat, and two horses. A narrow beck cuts through the fields and drainage lines in front of the property, swelling each winter with clockwork predictability and turning the road into a shallow, temporary crossing. It has done so for ten years.
That morning, my son was on the excavator, clearing out the ditches again, its metal arm biting into wet earth, trying to keep water moving where it is meant to go. The engine’s steady growl filled the air when he noticed his wife running across the field, a sheet of paper waving above her head like a signal flare.
“What’s that?” my son called out, not slowing down. “On second thoughts, don’t tell me until I’ve finished this.”
When he finally climbed down, she was waiting, her breath still sharp with urgency.
“A list of demands, ‘peppered with threats’,” she said. “Now he’s really lost the plot.”
“He is threatening to bankrupt us; have us registered as a nuisance noise polluter; and wants to notify authorities again about our actions,” she continued, voice tight with frustration and disbelief.
My son wiped his hands on his trousers, glancing back toward the ditch line he had just opened.
“He doesn’t seem to understand that by clearing the ditches, we will be able to safeguard him and his property from floods,” he replied.
“You know what he is like; recently, I think he’s mentally unwell and becoming increasingly paranoid,” she continues in no more than a whisper. “His wife confided in me the other day; she told me: ‘I am frightened of him. It got so much worse after Covid, and I don’t know what he will do next.’”
My son only shook his head at the wider absurdity of it all.
“Does he not realise that clearing the trees will keep them from falling into his property, thus protecting him, and that doing an operation on this scale requires machinery, which makes noise?”
Far away in the Antipodes, a local nurse doing research for a PhD comes across multiple papers and starts to put two and two together—not as a conclusion, but as a question that won’t settle—and begins to map a wider landscape of possible contributing factors: stress responses, sleep disruption, isolation effects, pre-existing vulnerabilities, and the complex, often delayed psychological impacts that large-scale societal disruption can leave in its wake. Nothing singular. Nothing clean. Just overlapping possibilities that resist simple explanation. The fluorescent lights in the hospital staff room never quite stopped humming.
Mara O’Neill had grown used to it over the years—late shifts in Perth, half-drunk coffee gone cold beside a laptop, and the quiet company of academic papers that most people would never willingly read on their day off.
Her PhD supervisor had told her, “Follow the signal, even if it looks like noise at first.” At first, that’s all this seemed like—noise.
A cautious review in Frontiers in Psychiatry(2024) caught her attention because of its careful language. It discussed rare reports of acute psychiatric symptoms occurring after a wide range of physiological or immunological stressors, emphasising uncertainty and the need for rigorous interpretation. The paper repeatedly stressed rarity and the absence of clear causal proof—but what intrigued Mara wasn’t any conclusion. It was the way unrelated case narratives sometimes described similar timing after acute stress events.
She leaned closer to the screen.
What she noted down wasn’t a pattern of certainty but a pattern of reports: sudden-onset symptoms, rapid changes in perception or mood, episodes requiring clinical attention in some cases and recovery in others, and many confounding variables that made interpretation difficult—sleep loss, infection, substance use, psychosocial stress, prior vulnerability, and reporting bias all sitting in the background like static. The reviewed case reports suggest that, in a very small number of individuals, COVID-19 vaccination was followed by significant changes in mental state, most notably the development of new-onset psychosis.
Mara rubbed her eyes and looked out the window of the hospital. A delivery truck backed into the loading bay below, with all ordinary motion and noise. Still, she couldn’t let go of what she was seeing—not as proof, but as something that demanded better questions. She opened a second paper, then another. Different countries. Different authors. Similar caution. Similar limitations. Similar insistence that correlation alone could not establish causation.
Her supervisor’s words returned again, but now differently: Follow the signal.
Mara typed a new heading into her document: “Temporal clustering of acute psychiatric presentations following periods of systemic stress: signal detection or interpretive bias?” She paused, then added: “Confounding variables and alternative explanations to be rigorously tested.”
Because even as the pattern sharpened in her mind, so did the responsibility to resist turning uncertainty into narrative too quickly. And in the quiet of the staff room, she understood something more uncomfortable than any conclusion: that some patterns exist only at the edge of meaning, where signal and coincidence are still indistinguishable, clear signals buried in white noise.
Outside, the hospital continued its night rhythm—steady, indifferent, unbothered by interpretations still forming.
Back at Willow Crescent, nothing had resolved, or indeed at Forge Acre, the mystery only deepened, and now the police were involved and an incident logged. Things had only accumulated and the noise of uncertainty grew louder, drowning out any hope of clarity. The pieces of the puzzle seemed to be scattering further apart, leaving her feeling more lost and overwhelmed than ever before. And in that accumulation, the world did not yet offer an answer—only the uneasy feeling that something had changed shape, even if no one could agree on what it was.
SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Psychiatry, 12 April 2024
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 15 – 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1360338
New-onset psychosis following COVID-19 vaccination: a systematic review
Vaccination Was Reported to Change Mental States
The reviewed case reports suggest that, in a very small number of individuals, COVID-19 vaccination was followed by significant changes in mental state, most notably the development of new-onset psychosis. While these events were rare compared with the billions of vaccine doses administered worldwide, the reported cases provide insight into the types of psychiatric symptoms observed and the possible biological mechanisms involved.
Nature of Mental State Changes
The most commonly reported mental state change was acute psychosis, often developing within the first week after vaccination. Patients who had no previous history of psychotic illness experienced symptoms such as the following:
- Delusions (false fixed beliefs)
- Hallucinations (hearing or seeing things that were not present)
- Disorganised or bizarre behaviour
- Paranoia and suspiciousness
- Confusion and altered perception of reality
- Severe insomnia
- Agitation and emotional instability
In many cases, symptoms emerged suddenly, representing a marked departure from the individual’s previous psychological functioning. The psychotic episodes varied in severity, ranging from brief disturbances to prolonged illnesses requiring hospitalisation and psychiatric treatment.