WASHINGTON – The coronavirus pandemic has led to a marked decline in the mental health of Americans, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday. That survey, which surveyed 5,412 Americans, found that “40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health status.”
According to the new study, 31 percent of respondents suffered from symptoms of anxiety or depression; 26 percent experienced symptoms of traumatic stress disorder; 13 percent used drugs like alcohol more heavily, than for the first time, to treat the pandemic; and 11 percent had seriously overcome suicide.
“Younger adults, racial / ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid adult caregivers reported being disproportionately worse off” mental health outcomes than other groups, the study concluded.
These findings represented levels of psychological distress higher relative to pre-pandemic levels. Anxiety symptoms tripled in chance compared to the same period in 2019; the incidence of depressive symptoms doubled. The rate of serious suicidal ideation doubled compared to levels recorded in 2018.
Notably, more than 90 percent said they were not treated for anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder before the pandemic struck, meaning their symptoms came with the coronavirus and its associated social disorders.
“Addressing differences in mental health and preparing systems to mitigate mental health consequences as the pandemic evolves will be urgently needed,” the study’s authors said. But with much of the nation still under lockdown, state and municipal governments being punished and people desperately seeking both work and childcare, it is not clear exactly what a reaction will look like, or how effective it will be. to be.
People of color have disproportionately suffered from the pandemic in terms of infection rate. The pandemic is also more likely to suffer from psychological illnesses. Suicidal thoughts were significantly more common among Black (15.1 percent) and Hispanic (18.6 percent) respondents when they were in the cohort altogether. Hispanics were also more likely to suffer from symptoms of anxiety and depression than their counterparts in other demographic groups (40.8 percent of Hispanics reported such symptoms).
President Trump has repeatedly called on states to lift lockdown mandates, arguing that the social isolation they promote is more harmful to public health than the virus itself. The study by the CDC does not evaluate measures such as lockdowns, or compensatory measures such as reopenings. But it suggests that the overall effect of the pandemic was detrimental to the American psyche.
The survey was conducted between June 24 and 30. By that time, the coronavirus had killed tens of thousands in the New York metropolitan area and moved south, to Florida, Georgia and Texas, where it would kill thousands more. In recent weeks, the pandemic has also spread to the Midwest, while also continuing to take a toll on California.
The conversation about mental health came to the fore earlier this month when former First Lady Michelle Obama admitted that the pandemic, combined with the grotesque images of police brutality and Washington’s vituperative politics, was causing her pain.
“I’m dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” Obama said on her new podcast. She later said she ‘was doing just fine’, but the permit seems to have licensed many Americans to discuss their own experiences over the past six months. With many schools not open to instruction in person, the influential season approaching and the economic recovery in an apparent stall, those experiences could remain challenging until 2021.
New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior put the matter bluntly in an op-ed published the same day that Obama revealed her own cravings. “We are not, as a nation, all right,” she wrote, citing statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation and other sources describing an irritated nation that sleeps too little and eats too much, and tumbles into something Senior calls “a sulfurous pit of need.”
And there was the tweetstorm of Los Angeles writer Susan Orlean, whose adventures with rosé were a reminder – as a very amusing one – that alcohol has become an all too reliable crutch for a jittery, lonely population.
How the nation will emerge from that sphere remains unclear. Trump promised a fax before the end of the year, but that time frame was widely described as too optimistic. Most experts believe that the current state of affairs will continue well into 2021.
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