Mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
Citation: Robinson E, Sutin AR, Daly M, et al. A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal cohort studies comparing mental health before versus during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Journal of Affective Disorders. 2022;296:567–576.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: The authors reported no external funding.
What is this? In this systematic review and meta-analysis, the authors searched for published studies or pre-prints of studies that sampled a cohort of patients using the same measures prior to 11 March 2020 (or 23 January 2020 for studies from China) and at least once after that date. They restricted their searches to articles published between January 2020 and January 2021. The authors included 65 studies, mainly from Europe (31) and North America (16). The four studies from China were analysed separately.
What was found: Compared to pre-pandemic levels, there was an overall increase in mental health symptoms in March and April 2020, which declined over time and became non-significant by May to July 2020. Increases in depression and mood disorder remained higher in May to July 2020 and tended to be larger compared with measures of anxiety and general mental health. Increases in symptoms were most pronounced among people with a physical health condition, but were not observed among people with a pre-existing mental health condition. There was no evidence that changes in mental health differed by age, gender, or continent.
The was high heterogeneity between samples, which was not explained by country-level factors, such as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, government financial support, or social restrictions.
Implications: The authors of the review stated that the findings indicated that there was considerable resilience in mental health overall. There is a need to continue mental health provision and monitoring, particularly for depression and mood disorders. Further research among people who might have been at increased risk, such as those who become seriously ill with COVID-19, lived in nursing homes, had suffered financially as a result of the pandemic, or worked in healthcare would be valuable.
Other considerations: The authors of the review did not discuss their findings in the context of issues relating to health equity.
This summary was prepared by Catherine Haynes, checked by Sydney Johnson, and finalized by William Summerskill.