Concept

Discussion: The mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with and without depressive, anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorders: a longitudinal study of three Dutch case-control cohorts

  • Graded dose response relation between number and chronicity of depressive symptoms, anxiety, or OCD and perceived mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, fear of the coronavirus, and decreased coping ability
  • Changes minimal or negative in people with severe/chronic mental illness but they scored higher across all symptom scales
  • Results support that people with mental illness are more vulnerable during the pandemic
  • Main causes for elevation in symptom levels in this more vulnerable population may be due to sadness and or a fear response to the unexpected conditions of the pandemic and lockdown
  • Most data collected from the 1st month of lockdown in Netherlands so the information represents initial emotional reactions which could later change as people begin to adjust to the situation
  • Pre existing mental illness generally did not expose people to having a worse emotional reaction to the first few weeks of the pandemic in the Netherlands
  • Limitations: low response rate; face to face interviews before the pandemic compared to online interviews during the pandemic; no standard assessment to confirm mental illnesses

0

1

Updated 2021-01-31

Contributors are:

Who are from:

Tags

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

Biomedical Sciences