When we talk about the mental health impact of COVID-19, we often frame it in the past tense, as if it were something we survived, processed and neatly packed away.

It wasn’t.

If you work in digital content or UX design, especially in public services, you’re already seeing the evidence. It’s there in the slow abandonment of forms. The cryptic “this doesn’t work” comments in usability testing. The unread notifications. The silence where feedback should be.

You won’t find “post-lockdown distress” as a formal user need. But it’s everywhere, and it’s shaping how people show up, or don’t, in your services.

And the hardest part is that most of it flies under the radar.

Five years on: we’re not back to normal

In March 2020, we were suddenly locked indoors, separated from each other and cut off from the everyday systems that gave structure to our lives. For children, young adults and older people, those months and years weren’t just an inconvenience; they were formative.

Now, five years later, new studies are revealing what many of us have sensed anecdotally: this wasn’t a temporary disruption. It was a profound psychological reset. And not always in ways we’ve accounted for.

• In the UK, teachers and health professionals continue to report significant increases in anxiety and behavioural issues in children who missed critical social development milestones.
• In France, a recent survey found over 30% of 18–24-year-olds still report emotional difficulties that started during lockdown and haven’t gone away.
• In the US, emergency room visits for youth mental health issues remain significantly higher than pre-2020.
• Among older adults globally, including those in Australia and Canada, levels of digital confidence, social resilience, and motivation have declined and remained low.

This isn’t about past trauma. It’s about ongoing adjustment. People haven’t simply returned to who they were before. In many cases, they’ve become someone else entirely, more hesitant, less resilient, more cautious, more forgetful, more emotionally taxed.

Micro trauma: the invisible weight

I call this kind of ongoing disruption “micro trauma”. It’s not headline-grabbing or immediately visible. It typically doesn’t appear in support tickets or stakeholder reports.

But you’ll see it in the emotional temperature of your digital service:

• Users start but don’t finish.
• They freeze when asked to explain themselves.
• They mistrust your tone of voice, even when it’s friendly.
• They react sharply to minor hurdles, like a login timeout.
• Or they disengage entirely and just… vanish.

These aren’t just pain points. They’re patterns of distress.

And often, they’re not caused by your content, but by life. However, your content is where they show up.

Why we’re not catching this in user research

Here’s the twist: even experienced researchers and content designers may be missing this. Why?

Because many users aren’t aware they’re carrying this weight. And even if they are, they don’t think it’s relevant to mention. When asked how a service could improve, they won’t say: “I’m emotionally numb after years of anxiety, and that makes me procrastinate filling in this form.”

They’ll say: “It’s fine.” Or “It’s confusing.” Or, more often, nothing at all.

And that’s why this matters. If we don’t understand how the emotional residue of the pandemic affects behaviour, we’ll continue to misdiagnose the problem. We’ll redesign based on the wrong hypothesis. We’ll think we’re fixing copy when in reality, we’re failing to acknowledge fear. We’ll simplify the interface, when what the user needed was reassurance.

How this changes content and UX strategy

So what do we do with this?

First, we stop pretending digital services are emotionally neutral. They never were.

Public service websites and portals are places where users turn to when life is already challenging. Add a layer of residual anxiety, cognitive fatigue, or mistrust, and you’ve got a perfect storm.

Here’s what I suggest content and UX teams build into their practices:

1. Design for diminished resilience

Assume people have less patience, not more. Less focus, not more. Make every interaction forgiving. Offer context and control. Give them ways to pause, come back, or change their mind.

2. Name uncertainty

Be clear when something is out of the user’s control and say what happens next. Avoid phrases like “you may be eligible” without explaining what will determine that. People are exhausted by ambiguity.

3. Let content absorb emotion

Your tone matters. Content should act like a gentle guide, not a digital foreman. Don’t flatten language to be “efficient”. It needs to be human. If something might feel intimidating, name it and reassure.

Example:
Don’t say: “Submit your evidence before the deadline or your claim will be closed.”
Say: “If it’s hard to get your evidence in time, let us know. We may still be able to help.”

4. Don’t overinterpret silence

If your analytics show that users aren’t clicking or progressing, don’t assume they’re “finding it easy”. Silent drop-off is often a sign of emotional overload, not satisfaction. Dig deeper.

5. Train teams in trauma literacy

Your researchers, designers and content strategists need to understand the signs of trauma response, even the subtle ones. Not to diagnose, but to notice, to question, and to advocate.

A personal note

I worked on my first public sector digital project in 1987, seven years before the earliest internet cafés in the UK, before websites, before email, before most people knew what “user experience” even meant. Since then, I’ve watched seismic shifts in how people engage with government services: from queueing at local offices to calling helplines, then to using desktop portals, mobile apps and now AI chat interfaces. Alongside that, we’ve seen waves of change in how we build those services, from Minitel-style networks to mobile-first and content-first, then digital-by-default and agile delivery, and now AI and beyond.

But none of those movements had to account for the emotional complexity that we’re seeing now.

Today’s content designer needs to be as fluent in emotional context as in plain English. You’re not just writing “how-to” instructions. You’re guiding people through life’s messiest moments. Sometimes, the biggest barrier to access isn’t a broken link, but a broken sense of self.

If we ignore that, we don’t just risk poor UX. We risk building services that quietly abandon the very people they’re meant to help.

Let’s meet users where they are, not where we wish they were

Five years on from lockdown, we don’t need to “get back to normal.” We need to design for the new normal, one where micro trauma is a given, not a glitch.

That means thinking of clarity as a form of kindness. Navigation as support. Content as care.

Because micro trauma doesn’t announce itself.

But it leaves fingerprints all over your service.