The infection COVID-19 is associated with an increased subsequent - up to a year later - risk of developing mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, alcohol and other addictive substance abuse, sleep disturbance, suicidal thoughts, etc., according to a major new American scientific study. The study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, points out that the mental health of those who have become ill with coronavirus, whether severe or mild, should be considered a priority issue, and in the long term.
The researchers, led by Dr. Ziyad-Al-Ali of Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Health System Clinical Epidemiology Center in St. Louis, who published the paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), analyzed data on nearly 156.000 people with an average age of 63 years who had been diagnosed as coronavirus positive and either hospitalized or not, as well as two control groups of 5.6 and 5.8 million people without Covid-19.
The study compared the mental health of the three groups over one year and found that those who had been through Covid-19 were generally 60% more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health problem or prescribed a psychiatric drug later on. For those who in particular had been hospitalized due to coronavirus, the risk of subsequent mental health disorders was increased by 86%.
People who were sick with coronavirus were 35% more likely to later suffer from anxiety disorders, almost 40% more likely to develop depression and 55% more likely to take antidepressants, as well as 65% more likely to use benzodiazepines to treat anxiety. They were also 41% more likely to suffer from sleep disorders, 80% from neurocognitive impairment (memory loss, confusion, difficulty concentrating, etc.) and 46% from suicidal thoughts, and were 34% more likely to have disorders due to opioid abuse and 20% non-opioid (e.g. alcohol).
Covid-19 was associated with 24 more people per 1,000 with sleep disorders, 15 per 1,000 with depression, 11 per 1,000 with neurocognitive impairment and 4 per 1,000 with non-opioid substance abuse. The risk to mental health was higher in people who had required hospital admission following coronavirus infection, but also applied to those who had not been hospitalised due to Covid-19.
Also, mental health problems were more common in people with Covid-19 than in those who had had the flu, as it was compared with a group of 72,707 people who had had flu, of whom almost 12,000 had been hospitalised. The risk of mental health problems was 27% and 45% higher for those who had experienced mild and severe Covid-19 respectively, compared to those with influenza. “This will hopefully dispel the perception that Covid-19 is like the flu. It's something much more serious,” Dr Al-‘Ali said.
Given that more than 416 million people in the world have now been diagnosed with coronavirus, the researchers noted that «Covid-19 infections have probably contributed to more than 14.8 million new cases of mental health disorders worldwide». Al-Ali added that “these calculations do not include an untold number of people, probably several million, who suffer in silence because of mental health stigma or lack of resources and support. Indeed, we expect the problem to get worse because the incidence seems to increase over time. Frankly, the scale of this mental health crisis is terrible and sad.”.
