Acute mental health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia

  1. Jill M. Newby
  2. Kathleen O’Moore
  3. Samantha Tang
  4. Helen Christensen
  5. Kate Faasse

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Abstract

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0236562
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.03.20089961: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethics approval and consent: The study was approved by the UNSW Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel and the UNSW Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number 3330).
    Consent: All respondents provided electronic informed consent before participating.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot 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:
    Limitations: The results are based on a convenience sample recruited online, who were mostly women (85%) and well educated, and a significant proportion reported having lived experience of a mental health diagnosis (70%). This may overestimate the symptom severity and impact of COVID-19, especially given past studies have shown worse impact of pandemics on those with pre-existing mental illness, and in females. It may also mean that the results cannot generalise to the broader Australian population. Results are also based solely on validated self-report measures, due to their ease and speed of assessment, and administration. Conducting diagnostic interviews to assess mental health diagnoses with more than 5000 participants in 10 days would not have been feasible. Future studies need to explore the impact of COVID-19 on mental health of COVID-19 patients, given evidence of increased rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, sleep disturbance and depression in SARS patients [5, 44]. Finally, the study was cross-sectional; the next step in our research is to track this cohort over time, to explore how their mental health changes as the pandemic evolves in Australia.

    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.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.03.20089961v1 on medRxiv