The mental health effects of the first two months of lockdown and social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK
By Xiaowei Xu, J. Banks. 2020
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using longitudinal microdata for the UK over the period 2009-2020 we control for pre-existing previous trends in mental health in order to isolate and quantify the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mental health in the UK worsened by 8.1% on average as a result of the pandemic and by much more for young adults and for women which are groups that already had lower levels of mental health before Covid19. Hence inequalities in mental health have been increased by the pandemic. Even larger effects are observed for measures of mental health that capture the number of problems reported or the fraction of the population reporting any frequent or severe problems, which more than doubled. 1 We are grateful to the ESRC-funded Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (ES/M010147/1) for funding this research. Essex/UKDA for data and access. The Understanding Society COVID-19 study is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Health Foundation. Fieldwork for the survey is carried out by Ipsos MORI and Kantar. Understanding Society is an initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and various Government Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. The data are distributed by the UK Data Service. We are grateful to Richard Blundell, Rachel Griffith, Paul Johnson, Robert Joyce for their helpful comments on this paper. Responsibility for the analysis and interpretation of the data, and any errors, is the authors’ alone. 2 Professor of Economics, University of Manchester and Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Fiscal Studies 3 Senior Research Economist, Institute for Fiscal Studies
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, General Health Professions, Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30414a705547de098d2c159822adc12218e99fa1
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Citations in the corpus
- Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, background): “Although not directly comparable, Banks and Xu (2020) show that women’s mental health status in the UK in April 2020, as measured by changes in the General Health Questionnaire 12-item scale (GHQ-12) in the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), deteriorated relative to that of men comparing…”