COVID’s mental-health toll: how scientists are tracking a surge in depression

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its second year, new fast-spreading variants have caused a surge in infections in many countries, and renewed lockdowns. The devastation of the pandemic — millions of deaths, economic strife and unprecedented curbs on social interaction — has already had a marked effect on people’s mental health.

Researchers worldwide are investigating the causes and impacts of this stress, and some fear that the deterioration in mental health could linger long after the pandemic has subsided. Ultimately, scientists hope that they can use the mountains of data being collected in studies about mental health to link the impact of particular control measures to changes in people’s well-being, and to inform the management of future pandemics.

The data that emerge from these studies will be huge, says sociologist James Nazroo at the University of Manchester, UK. “This is really ambitious science,” he says.

More than 42% of people surveyed by the US Census Bureau in December reported symptoms of anxiety or depression in December, an increase from 11% the previous year. Data from other surveys suggest that the picture is similar worldwide (see ‘COVID’s mental stress’).

“I don’t think this is going to go back to baseline anytime soon,” says clinical psychologist Luana Marques, at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who is monitoring the mental-health impacts of the crisis in US populations and elsewhere. ...

The distress in the pandemic probably stems from people’s limited social interactions, tensions among families in lockdown together and fear of illness, says psychiatrist Marcella Rietschel at the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

Studies and surveys conducted so far in the pandemic consistently show that young people, rather than older people, are most vulnerable to increased psychological distress, perhaps because their need for social interactions are stronger.

Data also suggest that young women are more vulnerable than young men, and people with young children, or a previously diagnosed psychiatric disorder, are at particularly high risk for mental-health problems. “The things that we know predispose people to mental health problems and conditions have been increased as a whole,” says Victor Ugo, a campaign officer who specializes in mental-health policy at United for Global Mental Health, a mental-health advocacy group in London. ...