“Many people have struggled and it's critical they get the support they need, but there wasn't this falling apart,” said McGill professor Brett Thombs, the study's senior author.
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There was no pandemic-induced mental health tsunami after all, a new global study has found.
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The COVID-19 crisis had no negative impact on general mental health and anxiety, and only a minimal worsening of depression symptoms, according to the McGill University-led study, published Wednesday in the medical journal The BMJ.
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After the world locked down in March 2020, many were unhappy and frustrated amid social isolation and disruptions to daily life.
But that didn’t translate into a large-scale decline in mental health, Brett Thombs, the study’s senior author, said in an interview.
“Many people have struggled and it’s critical they get the support they need, but there wasn’t this falling apart,” said Thombs, a professor in McGill’s psychiatry department.
“There was a lot of pulling together and a lot of resilience.”
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Amid the pandemic, headlines suggesting mental health was deteriorating significantly were based primarily “on individual studies that are ‘snapshots’ of a particular situation, in a particular place, at a particular time,” Thombs said.
A truer picture needed comparisons with what existed before.
That’s why for the BMJ paper — described as “the world’s most comprehensive study on COVID-19 mental health” — researchers focused on 137 papers from around the world that investigated the same participants before and during the pandemic.
Researchers “pulled together all the studies in the world that had actual data from before COVID and then re-collected data amid COVID, and we found that when there were changes they were small or minimal,” Thombs said.
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“That doesn’t mean it didn’t mess with anybody. It certainly messed with some people.”
Thombs pointed to one study that found two-thirds of respondents confirmed feeling frustrated and low amid the pandemic. But the same study found no increase in anxiety or depression symptoms.
“Overall, (the pandemic) wasn’t a catastrophe in mental health. It wasn’t a preordained tsunami of mental health.”
Many people found ways to combat solitude by connecting with others during lockdowns, Thombs said. They got together online via Zoom and met outside for socially distanced exercise, for example.
“It wasn’t ideal — it was unpleasant and frustrating at a minimum for all of us and devastating for some people.”
Yet there were also “opportunities for people who came together to see they really could meet these challenges. And despite a lot of real unpleasantness and difficulty, they pulled through.”
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There were some exceptions:
- For some women, anxiety, depression or general mental health symptoms worsened, perhaps due to heavy family responsibilities, working in health care or elder care, or family violence.
- Depression symptoms worsened by minimal to small amounts for older adults, university students, and people who self-identify as belonging to a sexual or gender minority group.
The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in December 2019, with much of the world locking down around mid-March 2020.
All the 137 studies reviewed were conducted in 2020, with three of them checking on participants past that date, with no evidence of any worsening, Thombs said. Researchers plan to update the paper with more recent data.
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The study suggests the lack of evidence of a large-scale decline in mental health so far could be because “people are resilient and have made the best of a difficult situation.”
“Indeed, although evidence is limited, data suggest, for example, that suicide generally declines during periods of societal conflict. War and pandemics have different characteristics, but in both, there is a shared threat and a common focus on collective action to tackle that threat.”
Despite concerns suicides would rise during the pandemic, a major study found that rates remained steady or declined, Thombs noted.
Most of the studies the researchers analyzed were from high- or middle-income countries. About 75 per cent of the studies’ participants were adults; the rest were mostly teenagers.
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There were fears that social isolation and being away from school would affect young people.
“We don’t really know what happened with children, but adolescents didn’t do worse” on the mental health front, Thombs said.
“That was kind of surprising because I think everyone had a pretty awful time with schooling at home on Zoom,” he added.
Though being cooped up at home and going to school online may have left teenagers sad and frustrated, it appears most were able to overcome the challenge, Thombs said.
“There’s a difference between the kinds of daily frustrations and challenges we face and whether or not we can meet those challenges and be resilient to them, and having mental health symptoms,” he said.
It becomes a mental health issue when you’re not able to cope, he added.
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Depression is when “you’re so sad, down and disinterested that you’re not enjoying anything you’re doing,” Thombs said.
“You’re anxious, and you’re cycling thoughts through your head so much that you can’t function in school. You can’t keep your mind on anything you want to be doing. Those are different than being frustrated or sad at times, yet you can still go on a Zoom call and enjoy yourself with a friend.”
In the end, COVID-19 pandemic had limited impact on depression, anxiety: study - Windsor Star
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