“Everything just went haywire. My moods were all over the place,” says Black actor and producer Dami Adeyeye, as he describes the perfect storm of living with his family under lockdown in the UK, watching police brutality in the US after the killing of George Floyd and seeing showing that covid-19 is deadlier if you are from a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) background.
The 27-year-old Adeyeye has experienced depression in the past and isn’t alone in grappling with his mental health during the pandemic. Across the UK, a greater percentage of people from a BAME background said concerns over jobs, housing and money had damaged their mental health during the pandemic than white people, according to a survey of 14,000 adults with an existing mental health condition by the UK charity Mind.
The research is part of a growing wave revealing the contours of the mental health crisis many experts predicted would come to pass because of the pandemic.
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Tom Dening at the University of Nottingham in the UK notes that covid-19 itself causes neuropsychiatric problems such as delirium. People treated for the illness in intensive care units are left with a higher risk of depression and anxiety, with around 40 per cent likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That could eventually amount to tens of thousands of people in the UK, says Dening.
Indirectly, the coronavirus has also had sweeping effects on the mental health of many. “The general population is suffering the effects of uncertainty, isolation, disruption of their social networks, fear of getting the illness, worrying about family, concerns about employment, education and money,” says Dening.
Anxiety and depression levels rose in the UK and other countries in the run-up to covid-19 restrictions being implemented and have stayed above average during lockdowns.
“It’s not affected everybody equally,” says Daisy Fancourt at University College London, a researcher working on of the mental health of 50,000 people in the UK during lockdown. “[During lockdown] younger adults have had worse mental health across every single measure, including life satisfaction, suicidal thoughts, and self-harming. Results are also worse among lower income households and people living alone.”
By comparison, older people have seen less of a blow to their mental health. Dening, who specialises in dementia, says some of his patients have been surprisingly unaffected. “Some of the people I was initially worried about, because they have such isolated lives, have actually coped very well. They had skills in living this way that other people had to acquire,” he says.
People in the UK who are married or in a civil partnership saw , according to the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS). On average marriage boosts health, but ONS says the rise may be because these people are more likely to have children and are struggling to balance home-schooling with work.
Overall, 37 per cent of adults in Great Britain at the start of May had high levels of anxiety; before the pandemic began, it was 21 per cent, . Other countries have seen similar rises. By 1 July, a of more than 56,000 people in China found 31.6 per cent had symptoms of anxiety.
There are signs that mental health services are struggling to help the people most severely affected. A separate by Fancourt and her colleagues found that three in five adults in the UK who have had suicidal thoughts during the pandemic haven’t had support from professional services.
In the UK, the level of elevated anxiety and depression has been stable under lockdown, marking this pandemic apart from previous epidemics such as SARS. With SARS, the sudden nature of quarantines saw mental health decline over 28 days and the smaller number of people affected meant those individuals were upset by what they were missing out on. With covid-19, many people were affected simultaneously so there was little to miss, and they could see it coming so their mental health became worse in anticipation, before levelling off.
Fancourt fears that with lockdowns now easing, population-level measurements of depression and anxiety may mask deteriorations for some. Some people are returning to more normal life, but others may experience a fear of missing out (FOMO) while under local lockdowns, which may be more traumatic than lockdowns early in the pandemic that affected everyone, she says.
Music, reading and filmmaking have lifted Adeyeye through the pandemic. For Katie Scott, a 22-year old student in Reading, UK, who found her eating disorder reappearing due to the social isolation of lockdown, society’s wider return to normality has helped. “When there is no normal, it’s really difficult to know what you’re aiming for in a mental health recovery. Now I’ve started seeing my friends and can go out, go shopping and go for drinks, it’s definitely improved,” she says.
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