Longitudinal changes in mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study
By M. Daly, A. Sutin, E. Robinson. Psychological Medicine, 2020
614 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a range of negative social and economic effects that may contribute to a rise in mental health problems. In this observational population-based study, we examined longitudinal changes in the prevalence of mental health problems from before to during the COVID-19 crisis and identified subgroups that are psychologically vulnerable during the pandemic. Methods Participants (N = 14 393; observations = 48 486) were adults drawn from wave 9 (2017–2019) of the nationally representative United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) and followed-up across three waves of assessment in April, May, and June 2020. Mental health problems were assessed using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12). Results The population prevalence of mental health problems (GHQ-12 score ⩾3) increased by 13.5 percentage points from 24.3% in 2017–2019 to 37.8% in April 2020 and remained elevated in May (34.7%) and June (31.9%) 2020. All sociodemographic groups examined showed statistically significant increases in mental health problems in April 2020. The increase was largest among those aged 18–34 years (18.6 percentage points, 95% CI 14.3–22.9%), followed by females and high-income and education groups. Levels of mental health problems subsequently declined between April and June 2020 but remained significantly above pre-COVID-19 levels. Additional analyses showed that the rise in mental health problems observed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic was unlikely to be due to seasonality or year-to-year variation. Conclusions This study suggests that a pronounced and prolonged deterioration in mental health occurred as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in the UK between April and June 2020.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, General Health Professions, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a01b49814c41102eaa3e37e94ce5f07b19b7d91
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Citations in the corpus
- Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, methodology): “Using the same data, Etheridge and Spantig (2020) document similar gender differences and Daly et al. (2020) find higher increases in mental health problems (GHQ-12≥ 3) for women.”
- The gender gap in mental well-being during the Covid-19 outbreak: evidence from the UK (2020, result): “As such, our work is most similar to Banks and Xu (2020), Daly et al. (2020), Davillas and Jones (2020), and Zhou et al. (2020), who use the same data to us.”