COVID‑19 and Americans’ Mental Health
COVID‑19 and Americans’ Mental Health
Blog Article
“The COVID-19 pandemic caused not only millions of hospitalizations and over a million deaths in the United States but a widespread and enduring mental health crisis.”
That is the conclusion of a study last month in the Journal of Adult Development by Jeffrey J. Arnett, senior research scholar at Clark University, and Deeya Mitra, assistant professor of psychology at Salisbury University. Their study examined the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms in a large sample of American adults between 2019 and the summer of 2024.
Arnett and Mitra found evidence of a steep rise in anxiety and depression that affected all adult age groups but was especially pronounced in young adults aged 18 to 29. Although the anxiety diminished after the introduction of vaccines in December 2020, higher-than-baseline rates of anxiety and depression persisted throughout 2023, with Delta and Omicron waves, “even though by then there were no requirements for social isolation or social distancing and no major disruptions to daily life.”
Given the scale of mass death and illness globally across these years, a significant rise in anxiety and depression is not just understandable but altogether unsurprising. In the United States, according to the World Health Organization last year, over 100 million people have been infected, and over one million people have died from SARS-CoV-2, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the airborne neuroinvasive virus known to cause COVID-19 and Long Covid.
Since April 2000, the highly transmissible pathogen has also been known to cause brain inflammation and multiorgan damage, particularly of the heart and lungs. According to the WHO, infections in the United States peaked at over 800,000 per day in January 2022, while deaths from COVID-19 peaked at roughly 3,300 per day in January 2021, resulting in a three-year “national emergency” that was declared over by May 2023.
“It would certainly be expected that such a massive threat to health and life would arouse substantial fear, anxiety, and depression,” note Arnett and Mitra, making it “reasonable to hypothesize that the mental health effects would be greatest in the age group that was most at-risk for infection, hospitalization, and death—that is, the oldest adults.” They also speculate that COVID-related mental health symptoms would be “inversely related to age, so that the youngest, healthiest adults, who were least likely to be hospitalized or die from the pandemic, would also have been the least likely to respond to the pandemic with anxiety and depression.”
However, and for reasons not fully explained by their study, the data upend both assumptions. Analysis of psychological responses to the pandemic in the United States reveals “a pattern just the opposite of what might be expected based on physical vulnerability: It is the youngest American adults who have been most likely to respond to COVID-19 with psychological distress, not the oldest, and reports of distress decreased, not increased, with age.”
COVID-related distress turned out to be “lower in all older age groups—lowest of all, 27 percent, among the oldest Americans ages 65 and up,” though this last group experienced much higher-than-average rates of hospitalization, illness, and death than before the pandemic. Report this page