COVID-19 impact on mental health
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Abstract
Background
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has posed a significant influence on public mental health. Current efforts focus on alleviating the impacts of the disease on public health and the economy, with the psychological effects due to COVID-19 relatively ignored. In this research, we are interested in exploring the quantitative characterization of the pandemic impact on public mental health by studying an online survey dataset of the United States.
Methods
The analyses are conducted based on a large scale of online mental health-related survey study in the United States, conducted over 12 consecutive weeks from April 23, 2020 to July 21, 2020. We are interested in examining the risk factors that have a significant impact on mental health as well as in their estimated effects over time. We employ the multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) method to deal with missing values and take logistic regression with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) method to identify risk factors for mental health.
Results
Our analysis shows that risk predictors for an individual to experience mental health issues include the pandemic situation of the State where the individual resides, age, gender, race, marital status, health conditions, the number of household members, employment status, the level of confidence of the future food affordability, availability of health insurance, mortgage status, and the information of kids enrolling in school. The effects of most of the predictors seem to change over time though the degree varies for different risk factors. The effects of risk factors, such as States and gender show noticeable change over time, whereas the factor age exhibits seemingly unchanged effects over time.
Conclusions
The analysis results unveil evidence-based findings to identify the groups who are psychologically vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides helpful evidence for assisting healthcare providers and policymakers to take steps for mitigating the pandemic effects on public mental health, especially in boosting public health care, improving public confidence in future food conditions, and creating more job opportunities.
Trial registration
This article does not report the results of a health care intervention on human participants.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.21.21252159: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. 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:While this study offers us quantitative evidence how the COVID-19 pandemic can psychologically challenge the public, several limitations need our future explorations. Firstly, the data used in this project are from an online …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.21.21252159: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. 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:While this study offers us quantitative evidence how the COVID-19 pandemic can psychologically challenge the public, several limitations need our future explorations. Firstly, the data used in this project are from an online survey studying how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting households across the US from social and economic perspectives. Thus, the data may not contain enough necessary factors related to mental health issues. Secondly, the interaction effects between the predictors are not considered in our analysis, so the capacity of the model may be somewhat limited. Lastly, while an imputation method is used to handle missing observations, due to the large proportion of missing values in the data, the analysis results incur extra variability induced from the additional data management procedure. The analysis here provides us evidence-based findings on the pandemic impact on the public mental health, which, in turn, offers us the guidance on the prevention of people from having negative emotions, such as depression, anxiety, and stress. Basically, it is very important to improve the welfare and take actions to ensure the public health care, for example, trying to improve the proportion of people covered by the insurance. Secondly, improving public confidence in future food conditions is also crucial. Lastly, actions and policies should be adopted to deal with the current low employment rate. In the end, more psychological counseling and psychotherapy services should ...
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.
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