by The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t caused major damage to people’s mental health, new research shows.
Overall, people reported being about as prone to depression, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms both before and during 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 first exploded. But why hasn’t the pandemic had a wide-ranging impact on mental health given how much it’s impacted people’s lives?
In a way, the results aren’t surprising, experts told Live Science.
As with previous disasters, people have shown they are resilient and able to adapt to the threat of COVID-19, he said Bruria Adini (opens in new tab)Head of the Department of Emergency Management and Disaster Medicine at Tel Aviv University who tracked this Impact of the pandemic over time in Israel (opens in new tab) but was not involved in the new analysis.
“Adversity does not cause most people to become incapacitated over time,” Adini said.
However, there was nuance in the results, with some groups, such as parents and sexual and gender minorities, performing worse overall than the general population.
Impact of COVID on mental health
The study, published March 8 in the British Medical Journal (opens in new tab)analyzed 137 studies that looked at the mental health of the same people before January 2020 and later in 2020, although one study revisited the participants in 2021. Collectively, these studies included tens of thousands of people from at least 32 countries, most of whom were middle-income-high earners.
The meta-analysis found no general differences in rates of self-reported symptoms of depression or anxiety, or in general mental health symptoms, which may include things like fatigue or impaired appetite or sleep, across the population. Some subgroups, including women, parents, and sexual and gender minorities, saw mental health deterioration, but these deteriorations were relatively small, nothing comparable “Tsunami” of mental health problems (opens in new tab) some predicted.
The findings sparked a wave of skepticism on social media, with users pointing out how cranky they were during the COVID-19 lockdown era.
“I built my cat a mech suit out of cardboard” tweeted comedy writer Jesse McLaren (opens in new tab), alongside photos of a stunned cat on a cardboard robotic creation. Meanwhile, quantum computing specialist Anna Hughes tweeted photos of her cooking quarantine project.increasingly worrying eggs (opens in new tab).”
This tweet genre inadvertently reveals part of what might be behind the apparent lack of mental health disaster: people are adaptable and finding creative ways to deal with it and connect, even in difficult situations. Because of this, some psychologists weren’t surprised that the pandemic didn’t trigger huge spikes in negative mental health symptoms.
“Humans are far more resilient than is commonly thought, so I didn’t expect a significant mental health impact,” he said Anton Mancini (opens in new tab)a clinical psychologist at Pace University who was not involved in the current study but published similar findings in the journal psychological medicine (opens in new tab) in 2021. Lockdowns may have hit mental health both ways, Mancini added. Although they ripped people out of their daily lives and increased isolation, they also reduced stressful everyday issues like commuting.
But there are more nuances in the results. Both Mancini’s work and the new study found differences in how people responded. co-author of the study Danielle Rice (opens in new tab), a clinical psychologist at McMaster University in Canada, and her colleagues found that there was a mild to moderate deterioration in overall mental health and a slight deterioration in parental anxiety after the onset of the pandemic. Older adults, college students, and sexual and gender minorities all experienced slight increases in depression symptoms. On the other hand, people with existing mental illness saw some small improvements in overall mental health and depression symptoms.
Some of these findings make sense, Rice told Live Science. For example, women are over-represented in healthcare and may therefore have experienced more work-related stressors in the early pandemic. Parents have had to deal with school closures and childcare disruptions.
But those results should also be taken with a grain of salt, as each subgroup was small enough that the estimates are uncertain, she said. And the meta-analysis included a limited number of studies, each with weaknesses, he said Roxane Cohen Silver (opens in new tab)a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the research.
“There are serious limitations in most of the research that involves them,” Silver told Live Science.
Study Restrictions
Rice and her team selected studies that provided comparisons of mental health in the same people before and after the pandemic began. That’s a valid choice, Silver said, but omits many studies that began after the pandemic began. Silver and her colleagues Nationwide representative studies carried out (opens in new tab) in the USA, which showed an increase in acute stress and depressive symptoms in the first months of 2020. However, these studies would not meet the criteria to be included in the new analysis, as they began in March.
While the studies may have had the benefit of pre-pandemic and post-pandemic measurements, they had other limitations. Most did not collect a representative sample of society, and many participants in these studies did not respond to follow-up surveys over time. These downsides should soften the conclusions of the meta-analysis, Silver said.
The studies were conducted globally, with 38% focusing on Europe and Central Asia, 34% on East Asia and the Pacific, 20% on North America, and 8% on the rest of the world. However, the vast majority was conducted in high- and middle-income countries, and 76% focused on adults, while most others focused on youth. Very few children under the age of 10 were accepted.
Rice and her colleagues focused on analyzing depression, anxiety, and general mental health symptoms because these were the most common questions asked in the studies they included. These symptoms are also important because they can indicate that a person may need clinical treatment, Rice said.
But people may have felt other things, like loneliness, stress, or heartache, that the surveys didn’t focus on. Silver’s work suggests that the level of mental health problems people experienced had a lot to do with their personal experience of the pandemic. Those who lost a loved one to COVID-19, who themselves had the disease in early 2020, or who consumed a lot of COVID-related media fared worst, according to their 2022 study published in the journal health psychology (opens in new tab).
Adini agreed that individual differences are very important. Her studies have shown that people’s stress levels, threat perceptions and mental health symptoms fluctuated during the first two years of the pandemic, and that it was not always the disease itself that caused the distress, but economic and national security concerns as well.
