Has Covid Affected Our Mental Health?

Imagine that your teenager was a star athlete, on track for a university athletics scholarship. But then they develop long Covid at the height of the pandemic, meaning they no longer had the lung capacity to run, let alone live independently. If that was your experience, you’re likely to think the government didn’t do enough to protect children from Covid-19, or vaccinate them fast enough.

On the other hand, what if your child developed an eating disorder due to social isolation and depression? In that case, you might think that lockdown measures were disproportionate. If you lost a loved one to the disease, then you might blame government for doing too little. If your small business of 20 years shut down, you might blame government for doing too much.

The point is that all our views on the pandemic, whether we’re a teacher, pub owner, healthcare worker or even a scientist, are coloured by our personal experiences of this huge, global storm.

I’ve been thinking about this in light of a new study that attempts to make sense of the effect the pandemic has had on our mental health. The latest British Medical Journal systematic review, from a Canadian team of researchers, looks at more than 100 studies from around the world and concludes that the pandemic didn’t result in any major changes in general mental health and anxiety symptoms, and only minimal changes in depression. This has led to headlines such as “Mental-health crisis from Covid pandemic was minimal”.

What’s needed here is nuance. Only that can capture what has undoubtedly been a traumatic few years – in which millions of people have felt loss, anger and frustration. And this is where general studies on “everyone’s mental health” are misleading.

The pandemic didn’t affect everyone equally. Groups that were badly affected include those with existing mental health conditions, children, people living with disabilities, adolescents and those without financial or social security nets. The BMJ study does highlight some of these groups and notes that the study didn’t capture the views of children. Children universally faced a difficult few years during a formative time, whether through losing caregivers to the virus, through school closures, or being more exposed to abusive adults inside their homes.