COVID-19 And Mental Illness: Worse Than We Even Imagined by Tim Donner for Liberty Nation
With hard data finally in on the devastating psychological toll of the pandemic, will more mandates make a tragic situation even worse?
As the nation descended into a collective dark night of the soul when the first pandemic of our lifetime hit with abandon during the infamous year of 2020, we understandably focused on the thousands dying and millions infected by the virus. But to understand the full extent of the haunting darkness in COVID World, one had to focus below the radar, at a deeply disturbing trend unfurling with little notice, but leading to questions that eventually became unavoidable.
How would Americans – and the people of every country on the planet infected by this damnable plague – be able to cope mentally with the sudden, wrenching displacement of their lives and careers, through no fault of their own? How would we react to being shut in and told to fear proximity to other people? How would we deal with spine-chilling predictions of millions of our fellow countrymen and women suddenly being hospitalized and dying?
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If ever there was a situation ripe for a widespread mental health crisis, it was this. But it was almost impossible to stop and recognize, not to mention quantify, the actual damage to our individual and collective psyche in real time, as each of us was trying just to get through one day at a time.
But now, the full, devastating toll of COVID-19 on the world’s mental health has for the first time been quantified in an exhaustive study published in The Lancet, the results of which are at once shocking, unsurprising, and devastating. While four to five million souls across over 200 affected nations have perished from COVID, according to multiple estimates, more than 25 times that number – 129 million – have suffered serious mental disorders.
In evaluating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health across the globe, researchers conducted a systematic review of 48 sets of data on the prevalence of depressive or anxiety disorders that were representative of the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic, working with a pre-pandemic baseline between January 1, 2020, and January 29, 2021.
The conclusion: The locations hit hardest by the pandemic in 2020, as measured by decreased human mobility and daily infection rate, had the greatest increases in prevalence of major depressive and anxiety disorders. This is consistent with a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) citing a similar correlation between the frequency of anxiety and depression and the average number of daily cases. In all, the Lancet study estimates that an additional 53 million cases of major depression and an additional 76 million instances of serious anxiety disorders have occurred worldwide due to COVID-19.
