Mental health and wellbeing among people with informal caring responsibilities across different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic: a population-based propensity score matching analysis
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Due to a prolonged period of national and regional lockdown measures during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been an increase reliance on informal care for informal carers. In light of this, the current study compared the experiences of carers and non-carers on various mental health and wellbeing measures across six key time points during the pandemic.
Methods:
Data analysed were from the University College London (UCL) COVID -19 Social Study. Our study focused on six time points in England: (1) the first national lockdown (March–April 2020); (2) the beginning of first lockdown rules easing (May 2020); (3) the second national lockdown (November 2020); (4) the third national lockdown (January 2021); (5) the easing of the third lockdown (March 2021); and (6) the end of restrictions (July–August 2021). We considered five mental health and wellbeing measures: depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, loneliness, life satisfaction, and sense of being worthwhile. Propensity score matching was applied for the analyses.
Results:
We found that informal carers experienced higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms than non-carers across much of the pandemic. During the first national lockdown, carers also experienced a higher sense of life being worthwhile. No association was found between informal caring responsibilities and levels of loneliness and life satisfaction.
Conclusion:
Given that carers are an essential national healthcare support, especially during a pandemic, it is crucial to integrate carers’ needs into healthcare planning and delivery. These results highlight that there is a pressing need to provide adequate and targeted mental health support for carers during and following this pandemic.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.21.21250045: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study had several limitations. First of all, the UCL COVID-19 Social Study did not use a random sample, therefore our sample is not representative of the population. However, the study does have a large sample size with wide heterogeneity, including good stratification across all major socio-demographic groups, and analyses were …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.21.21250045: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study had several limitations. First of all, the UCL COVID-19 Social Study did not use a random sample, therefore our sample is not representative of the population. However, the study does have a large sample size with wide heterogeneity, including good stratification across all major socio-demographic groups, and analyses were weighted based on population estimates of core demographics, with the weighted data showing good alignment with national population statistics and another large scale nationally representative social survey. But we cannot rule out the possibility that the study inadvertently attracted individuals experiencing more extreme psychological experiences, with subsequent weighting for demographic factors failing to fully compensate for these differences. Secondly, the UCL COVID-19 Social Study did not collect any information before the pandemic. Therefore, we were not able to compare the average treatment effect of being a carer before and during the pandemic. Further work is needed to understand if the pandemic has heightened the mental health risk for carers compared with usual times. Thirdly, this study treated carer status as a binary variable, without further exploring the intensity of caregiving, which has important implications for carers’ mental health and wellbeing. It is unknown whether individuals took on new informal caring responsibilities during the pandemic or withdrew from usual informal caring roles. Therefore, future work is needed to ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
