Likely Exacerbation of Psychological Disorders from Covid-19 Response

Abstract

Anxiety and fear felt by people around the world regarding the coronavirus pandemic is real and can be overwhelming, resulting in strong emotional reactions in adults and children. With depressive and anxiety disorders already highly prevalent in the general population (300 million worldwide), depression and/or anxiety specifically because of the pandemic response is likely. Moreover, the current state of panic in the face of uncertainty is apt to produce significant amounts of stress. While this situation has the potential to cause psychological disorders in previously unaffected populations, perhaps more impactful is the exacerbation of symptoms of many existing disorders including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and hoarding disorder.

The impact of COVID-19 on Physical Activity of Czech children

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented situations by which strict community lockdowns have negatively affected the movement and health behavior in children [ 11 ]. Negative consequences like increasing obesity [ 12 , 13 ], pain [ 14 ], depression, anxiety, feelings of loneliness [ 15 – 17 ], and sleep disturbances [ 18 , 19 ] are closely related to PA levels [ 31 , 43 , 44 ]. Our findings are similar to others [ 28 , 30 , 45 ] demonstrating a significant decline in PA in children during COVID compared to pre-COVID.…”

“…Governments implemented restrictions involving school and sport grounds closures resulted in health risks behaviors especially reduced PA and increase SB [ 11 ]. The regulations had negative effect on various mental and health aspects in children and youth such as increasing obesity [ 12 , 13 ], pain [ 14 ], depression, anxiety, loneliness feelings [ 15 – 17 ], sleep disturbances [ 18 , 19 ], decreased cardiorespiratory fitness [ 20 ] and many others, affecting especially socio-economic deprived children [ 11 ].…”

Prevalence and related factors of child posttraumatic stress disorder during COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Of the 132 screened full texts, 82 studies were excluded because their topic did not meet our inclusion criteria, and 30 studies were excluded because insufficient data were available to include them in the systematic review. In the end, 18 studies (15 written in English and 3 written in Chinese) were included in our systematic review [10][11][12][13][14][15][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], of which 10 studies were included in our meta-analysis [11,12,14,15,[23][24][25][26][27]29]. The remaining eight studies could only be included in our systematic review because insufficient data were available for the meta-analysis.…”

“…Therefore, we describe discuss these risk factors of child PTSD in a systematic review. We classified each risk factor into one of four categories: (a) personal and family characteristics, (b) infectious diseases related factors, (c) internal and external support system ('external system' refers to support from outside the individual [e.g., government], while 'internal system' refers to supporting individual perspective [e.g., resilience]), and (d) psychological and behavioral changes [10][11][12][13][14][15][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Neurocognitive Profile of the Post-COVID Condition in Adults in Catalonia—A Mixed Method Prospective Cohort and Nested Case–Control Study: Study Protocol

“…SARS-CoV-2 is also known to cause neuropsychiatric complications [43] and exacerbation of previous psychological disorders, such as anxiety and depression [44][45][46][47]. The causes of these manifestations are multifactorial and different mechanisms have been described, such as direct invasion of the virus into the brain (encephalitis/cerebral hypoxia) [48], the consequence of a deregulated immune response and a virus-induced cytokine storm [49,50], as well as physical isolation, psychosocial impact, and social stigma [51].…”