Long-term loss of smell could make people feel depressed, how to recover from it

The smell loss could be life-changing and potential to make people feel isolated and depressed. While two-thirds of people who lost their sense of smell after Covid-19 recover within six to eight weeks, many has been suffering from the long-term loss of smell and taste.

In this article, you can see that a beer sommelier and writer, Maggie Cubbler has also been suffering from the long-term loss of smell and taste after Covid-19, and how she has been dealing with her emotions and practising smell training .

[from the article by the Guardian]

Around three weeks after Covid-19 completely took away her sense of smell and taste, Maggie Cubbler had a beer. It was a pale ale she’d had before and, to her excitement, it tasted wonderful – just as she remembered. She was ecstatic to feel she was on the road to normality, but she soon found that recovery from Covid is by no means linear.

After that I started noticing that many things started smelling terrible – like absolutely revolting – and one of them was beer.” For a beer sommelier and writer of ten years, this was a devastating and isolating development. When the pandemic halted her beer travel business and decimated the industry generally, Cubbler had pivoted into doing a beer podcast. Now, with her sense of taste still muted and the source of her livelihood unbearable to smell, her career has been thrown into uncertainty.

“It’s so frustrating and dejecting. It’s a real stresser for people in these industries, we’re all lamenting our lot in life right now,” Cubbler said. She’s had no choice but to put her relationship with beer to one side for the foreseeable future, pivoting again to create an online magazine for women in their 40s. “I’m a pragmatic person but I’ve had to start a whole new career path at 40, which is really daunting. If I start to think about what I’ve lost, it’ll overwhelm me.”

More than half of people with Covid-19 experience the loss of smell or taste and while two-thirds recover within six to eight weeks, many are left without much improvement months down the line ( long-term loss of smell). Chrissi Kelly, the founder of smell loss charity AbScent, said there are over 200,000 cases of long-term anosmia in the UK, and smell loss had the potential to make people feel isolated and depressed.

Read this entire article by the Guardian