Original title: Mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: longitudinal analyses of adults in the UK COVID-19 Mental Health & Wellbeing study
Researchers followed adults in the UK across three surveys during the first six weeks of lockdown. They asked about several parts of mental health, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, well-being, and suicidal thoughts. Anxiety symptoms fell and positive well-being rose, but suicidal thoughts increased; depression and loneliness did not change significantly. Women, young adults, people from more disadvantaged backgrounds, and people with existing mental health problems had worse outcomes across most measures.
Imagine checking in on a group of neighbours several times during a long stretch at home. Some feel less tense as the weeks pass, while others still feel low or alone. In this paper, those check-ins are the repeated surveys, and the different feelings are the mental health measures they tracked over time.
The results show that mental health did not move in one direction during lockdown: some measures improved, while suicidal thoughts increased. Young adults, women, people from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds, and people with existing mental health problems had worse outcomes across most measures, making their needs especially important to recognise.
The abstract reports results from three survey waves covering the first six weeks of UK lockdown. It does not establish what caused the changes, how mental health changed after that period, or whether the findings apply outside the UK adult population.
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Mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: longitudinal analyses of adults in the UK COVID-19 Mental Health & Wellbeing study — Daryl Brian O'Connor, Karen Wetherall, Seonaid Cleare et al. — The British Journal of Psychiatry — doi:10.1192/bjp.2020.212
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.