Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
A key question within the field of mental health sciences
is 'How are we going to cope with and adapt to
the likely mental health impact of COVID-19 upon the population?'
The mental health community have mobilised with an incredible speed and efficiency
to ensure that the support that's required currently is available.
But we've also mobilised
to ensure that appropriate data collection methods are underway.
Several position papers have been published
which outline what the research priorities are in this space,
now and into the future.
It's really important for us as a mental health community
to understand exactly
the impact that COVID-19 is having on the mental health of the population
but also to understand exactly who needs the support,
in what circumstances,
and what type of support is required,
and then, of course, if that support is fit for purpose.
So my lab's studying the field of psychotraumatology.
This is essentially
the study of stressful, adverse, or traumatic life experiences
on the mental health of people within the population.
Therefore, it stands to reason
that we're really interested
in the impact that COVID-19 is having on the mental health of the UK population.
So on March 23rd, we launched the COVID19 Psychological Wellbeing Study
across the four nations of the UK.
This launch coincided with the day
that the UK prime minister
announced that every person in the UK should stay at home
unless they had a very specific or essential reason to leave.
So, essentially, this was the first official day of the UK lockdown.
There is prior evidence
that when restrictions such as quarantine and social isolation are put into place,
that this does indeed impact on people's mental health and well-being.
So, to date, in our COVID19 Psychological Wellbeing Study,
we've collected data from over 2,500 people living within the UK.
Several hundred people continue to complete assessments
on a weekly or monthly basis.
So the question is,
well, what are we doing with this data now that we have it?
Well, myself and my team are based here in Northern Ireland,
and therefore we felt it was important
to interrogate the 470 responses that we received
also from people living in Northern Ireland.
So far, we've concluded from the data
that 30% of those responding to our survey
are reporting symptoms
that would be indicative of a generalised anxiety disorder.
33% of those responding to our survey
are reporting symptoms that indicate a major depressive disorder.
And 20% are reporting symptoms
that indicate a post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, it's important, when you have figures like this,
that you're able to make some comparisons.
So we can go to the Northern Ireland Study for Health and Stress,
which was a population-wide survey conducted between 2004 and 2008.
They also produced some figures around these common mental health disorders,
and they reported that in Northern Ireland,
4.4% of the population met the criteria for generalised anxiety disorder,
16.3% met the criteria for major depressive disorder,
and 8.8% met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, it's really difficult that we make comparisons across studies
or that we make direct comparisons.
And this is because
sometimes we use different measures of people's psychological symptoms
or we might ask people to report their symptoms
across a different time span.
So the Northern Ireland Study for Health and Stress
reported symptoms across people's lifetime,
whereas in our study,
we asked people to report their symptoms
across the past two weeks or the past month.
So you can see how some comparisons might be difficult.
There is some work going on in the UK
related to COVID-19 psychological well-being,
a similar study to our own.
And this study has reported that of all of their respondents across the UK,
approximately 22% of them were reporting symptoms
that indicated a generalised anxiety disorder
or a major depressive disorder.
And in that study,
approximately 17% of their population were reporting symptoms
that would indicate a post-traumatic stress disorder.
So you can see
that there are similar results coming out from these studies.
But the good thing about the work that we do
is that we can also collect information about sociodemographics.
So we can look at what particular factors or particular demographics
might predict who will or who won't have one of these mental health outcomes.
So we found a general trend in our data based in Northern Ireland
whereby vulnerability for mental health outcomes
was indicated by being younger-aged,
by people who had a pre-existing mental health condition,
those who were engaging at a very high rate
with social and traditional media,
and also those who were really concerned about being infected by COVID-19.
We also found that those who were employed in one of the key worker roles,
as assigned by the government,
were more likely to have a mental health outcome
than those who were not.
So now that we have this information,
it's really important that we use it to actually help people with mental health
across a population,
and therefore we need to use it to improve the outreach of services.
So we need to ensure that outreach of services
meets the needs of those people who need them,
and therefore we need to ensure
that we try to get services to hard-to-reach populations.
We also need to prioritise the evaluation of therapeutic interventions
that are available to treat these common mental health issues,
and also we need to look at how effective these are
when they're delivered on digital platforms.
The government officials should look at funding plans
for the enhancement of the mental health workforce,
and, indeed, the Department of Health in Northern Ireland
just launched a Mental Health Action Plan containing 38 action points.
But it's really important
to ensure that we cope with and adapt from the mental health impact of COVID-19,
that the mental health strategy in Northern Ireland is well-coordinated,
well-resourced,
addresses those in hard-to-reach groups,
and ensures appropriate workforce planning
to ease the pressure on mental health workers.