Premium
Symptoms of depression and anxiety during the COVID‐19 pandemic: implications for mental health
Author(s) -
Herrman Helen,
Kieling Christian
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/mja2.51080
Subject(s) - mental health , citation , anxiety , covid-19 , depression (economics) , library science , psychology , sociology , psychiatry , medicine , disease , pathology , computer science , infectious disease (medical specialty) , economics , macroeconomics
Well designed longitudinal studies are needed to guide decisions about policies and actions to prevent and ameliorate mental health problems and to support population resilience. Such studies, however, are rare. One year into the pandemic, two systematic reviews and metaanalyses of longitudinal studies initiated or active early in 2020 have been published.5,6 They suggest that people around the world have generally been resilient to the initial effects of lockdowns,5 or describe small population increases in mental health symptoms that declined to prepandemic levels by mid2020.6 These findings are in line with previous reports on disasters, including Australian bushfires; most people exhibit acute responses to an unexpected adversity, but then adapt to the situation.1,2,7 The marked study heterogeneity in both analyses5,6 might be explained by sampling differences, but it is possible that specific subgroups were affected differently by the pandemic, as also reported for earlier disasters.1,2,5,6 The Australian study reported in this issue of the Journal,8 one of the first nationally representative longitudinal studies of mental health during the COVID19 pandemic,9,10 provides crucial insights into the experiences of vulnerable subgroups in Australia. The latent trait trajectories for depression and anxiety symptom scores during March – June 2020 identified by Batterham and colleagues suggest that, for most participants in their survey, stress related to the pandemic was transient and unlikely to lead to clinical depression or anxiety disorders. However, they also identified trajectories of elevated or increasing depression (about 19% of participants) and anxiety symptom scores (23% of participants) over the 12week period. Factors associated with these trajectories were COVID19related social and role impairment and financial distress, an existing mental disorder diagnosis, younger age, and exposure to recent adversity (the bushfires of 2019– 20). This pattern is consistent with previous suggestions1,6,7 that the pandemic should raise concerns about risks for mental ill health in particular subgroups of people.