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A little-understood virus infecting and killing thousands, isolating lockdowns that upended lives and uncertainty over whether it will – if at all – end
The Covid-19 pandemic was tough. By May 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) already warning of a ‘massive increase in mental health conditions’.
But a major study this week in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found the mental fallout from the pandemic was more a ‘minimal’ ripple than a tsunami.
Mental health experts told Metro.co.uk, however, that for a lot of more vulnerable minority groups, the pandemic was anything but ‘minimal’.
The review saw a team of researchers look at 137 mental health studies across high-income countries in Europe and Asia.
They compared anxiety and depression levels since January 2021 to the two previous years and found that, generally, mental health didn’t drastically change.
The review published Wednesday said: ‘At a population level, there has been a high level of resilience during Covid-19.
‘And changes in general mental health, anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms have been minimal to small.’
Though this wasn’t the case for everyone, the team, from Canadian institutions including McGill, Ottawa and Toronto universities, said.
Women, they acknowledged, experienced worsening mental health conditions. Especially, as earlier studies have shown, those disproportionately burdened by domestic tasks, such as childcare, and victims of domestic abuse.
Older people, university students and LGBTQ+ people also all saw their despair deepen ‘significantly by minimal to small amounts’.
The researchers’ findings recalled the idea of ‘human resilience’, that social support and a strong sense of hope can help people ride out disasters.
Anxiety and depression are natural reactions to any disaster but don’t always become chronic – people might be surprised by just how resilient they can be.
But professor Richard Williams, lead on COVID-19 for the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said resilience isn’t the same for everyone.
‘Mental health services delivered an additional 1.6 million sessions during the first year of the pandemic alone,’ he said of the UK.
‘It is important that we take this into account when looking at the whole picture.’
Between 2019 and 2020, the number of UK adults showing symptoms of depression almost doubled, per the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
And it didn’t take long – just before the pandemic, the figure was 10% and by June 2020, it was 19%.
‘We know mental illnesses can take years to develop and some people who started struggling during the pandemic are only now being diagnosed with a mental illness,’ Williams added.
This is something the review’s researchers stress: ‘The pandemic has affected the lives of many people – and some are now experiencing mental-health difficulties for the first time.
‘Governments should continue to ensure that mental health supports are available and respond to population needs.’
Stephen Buckley, head of information at the charity Mind, said mental health providers would also say differently to the team’s conclusion.
‘The findings of this international research into the mental health effects of the pandemic are interesting,’ he said, ‘however, they do not reflect the impact Mind witnessed in England and Wales during and after the pandemic.’
Buckley said Mind’s hotlines were jammed with calls during the first lockdown. As demand increased, so did the ‘complexity and length’ of the calls.
‘Data from the (ONS) also shows that average ratings for all measures of well-being still remain below pre-coronavirus pandemic levels,’ he added.
Charting psychological distress, in general, is no easy task as it relies on squishing a lot of hard-to-explain feelings into numbers and graphs.
But doing so over the pandemic is even trickier. Someone’s situation – such as whether they worked from home or on the frontline – can make a big difference.
Lockdown, for example, may have been a welcome respite for some eager to get away from work or school. For others, this was their breaking point.
So experts say it’s vital to be specific. But the data reviewed by the researchers, the experts said was safe to say, left a lot of people out.
It didn’t survey people in low-income countries or focus on many vulnerable groups more likely to be affected, such as disabled people or children.
‘This overlooks the toll taken on some less visible – but more disadvantaged – groups,’ Buckley said, adding that people on low incomes fall into this.
An NHS England survey, for example, found nearly one in six seven-16-year-olds and one in four 17-19-year-olds had a ‘probable’ mental health condition in 2022.
The pandemic also took a disproportionate toll on people of colour, Jeremy Bernhaut, head of policy and influencing at Rethink Mental Illness, added.
‘There are several significant limitations to this research, chief among them the lack of insight it provides on people likely to have been hardest hit by the pandemic, including those already living with mental illness and people from Black, Asian and minority communities,’ he said.
Data has found that Black and Asian people – especially women – were more likely to report significantly higher levels of mental distress than white people.
LGBTQ+ people as well faced unique challenges during the pandemic that led to despair, said Monty Moncrieff of the queer mental health charity London Friend.
‘It’s great that many people were resilient enough to manage the impact of Covid. But a headline like that risks masking the disproportionate impact for different population groups,’ the chief executive said.
‘This is concerning for LGBTQ+ people as we’ve historically been overlooked when it comes to healthcare and support services.’
LGBTQ+ people’s mental health wasn’t great even before the pandemic. The gist: Years of reported poorer life satisfaction than the population as a whole.
From young LGBTQ+ people being stuck at homes with homophobic or transphobic relatives to seeing lifelines like queer venues being shut, Moncrieff said queer people felt the pandemic hard.
‘Multiple reports, from the BMJ to The Lancet, to surveys by our community organisations consistently show that LGBTQ+ people’s mental health was negatively affected throughout the pandemic more often and more widely than non-LGBTQ+ people,’ he added.
For Buckley, the findings in the BMJ review can’t be applied to everyone. Each person had their own experience of 2020 to 2022 and will heal differently.
And governments need to acknowledge that as the world moves forward.
‘To support the recovery from the pandemic and learn appropriate lessons for the future, it is crucial that we develop an evidence-based understanding of its impact on all groups, not just those least at risk of a decline in mental health,’ he said.
‘We still have some way to go in achieving this.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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