Original title: Levels and predictors of anxiety, depression and health anxiety during COVID-19 pandemic in Turkish society: The importance of gender
Researchers used an online questionnaire to assess depression, anxiety, and worry about health in Turkish society during COVID-19. They looked for links between these scores and factors such as gender, where people lived, chronic illness, and past psychiatric illness. Women and people with a history of psychiatric illness were among the groups linked to higher anxiety or health anxietyWorry about having or developing an illness.; city living was linked to anxiety and depression. Because the study measured people at one point in time, it cannot show that these factors caused the mental-health differences.
Imagine a school trying to find out which students are most stressed by asking everyone how they feel on the same day. Some groups report more stress, but that single check cannot show what caused the difference. In this paper, the questionnaire is that check, and the researchers compare mental-health scores across groups in Turkish society during the pandemic.
Mental-health services may need to pay particular attention to women, people in urban areas, those with a history of psychiatric illness, and people with chronic disease during a pandemic. The study points to groups that could be prioritised in future psychiatric planning, though it does not show that these factors caused distress.
The cross-sectional questionnaire shows associations at one point in time, not that any factor caused distress or how mental health changed over time. The abstract does not report the sample size, response rate, or whether the results represent all people in Turkish society.
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Levels and predictors of anxiety, depression and health anxiety during COVID-19 pandemic in Turkish society: The importance of gender — Selçuk Özdin, Selçuk Özdin, Şükriye Bayrak Özdin et al. — International Journal of Social Psychiatry — doi:10.1177/0020764020927051
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.