In The Face of COVID: Mental Health Resilience

"That's the kind of data we're getting across the board; that at a population level we're not seeing changes."

"In many ways, things are OK."

"[Humans are dealing with COVID better than anticipated]; overall there's a lot of resilience."

"All the evidence seems to be showing that there is not a tsunami of a mental health crises."

"[But] I think we need to be concerned about vulnerable groups."

Brett Thombs, medical researcher, McGill University 

 

The World Health Organization stated, while on the cusp of declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, that the disease would carry along a tide of loneliness and self-harm through its penetration of every facet of peoples' lives. Canadians were forewarned by the Canadian Mental Health Association of an "echo pandemic" expressed in acute anxiety and depression. With all this in mind, governments around the world began to take note of what lay ahead, funding crisis hotlines and online counselling programs.

Timely proaction in the prevention of suicides which rates as one of the most reliable indicators of mental health in society. But as the situation matured it began to look as though the fears of mental health breakdowns leading to increases in suicide just wasn't going to happen. Not only was there no upward-slanting change in the suicide rate, it began instead to decline to the pleased consternation of record-keepers and health advocates.

Australia, England, Norway all saw that suicide rates appeared to remain the same as they were before the onset of the deadliest times of the first wave. Dr.Thombs and an international group of scientists headed up a massive project in cataloguing and reviewing all of the world's mental health research on COVID-19, calling it a "living systematic review" with an aim to produce a generalized snapshot of the mental health of the world's 7.6 billion people under COVID-19.

The team carefully riffled through over 50,000 studies published globally to gauge everything from anxiety to depression to loneliness under pandemic conditions, rejecting slighter research defined as studies with small sample sizes or flawed data collection like voluntary web surveys, to sift through the total, rejecting research identified for its poor quality and potential bias. The remainder whose conclusions were felt to be trustworthy presents a picture of a world managing to cope fairly well despite the s stressors of COVID.

In the United Kingdom, population-level data expressed the finding that depression and anxiety briefly spiked with the lockdowns, then returned to normal "possibly because individuals adapted to circumstances", the researchers wrote. The global entry of COVID-19 caused suicide rates to plunge 15 percent, a huge survey of Norwegians found, with mental illnesses subsiding noticeably in the first weeks of lockdowns.

Rates of loneliness remained roughly the same, a nationwide survey of Americans discovered, "Despite some detrimental impact on vulnerable individuals, in the present sample, there was no large increase in loneliness but remarkable resilience in response to COVID-19", Florida State University researchers concluded. A cohort of students with pre-existing mental health concerns saw slight improvements to overall wel0-being at McGill University, examining mental health before and after the pandemic struck, representing one of the only major Canadian studies.

Calls to crisis hotlines had soared across the board since the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns. Dr.Thombs noted that the hotline calls could represent an indication of increased psychological distress, but just as easily reflect more awareness, given funding to these hotlines under lockdown. Young Swiss men presented clear majorities reporting having difficulties coping with "abstaining from cultural events", or "not spending time with people privately". Still, they ranked overall depression and stress as average; clearly the effect of the pandemic failed to bump them into worse mental health.

An Italian study credited the "misery loves company" effect or "come together effect", an unexpected surge of well-being and good feelings in the face of a common enemy, with increasing well-being under lockdown. In that the greater the time Italians spent on social media looking at the pandemic problems of neighbours, the better in comparison they felt of their own situation.

Problems with mental health tensions did occur in a number of smaller demographics, however. Health-care workers, residents in long-term care homes, racialized communities, those with pre-existing mental illness, and youth severed from schools, activities and support services.

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