Abstract
COVID-19 disease was announced as a global pandemic in March 2020 by the World health organization (WHO). Saudi Arabia was among the first countries to enforce restriction measures such as closing schools, remote working, and a travel ban. We aim to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s depression in Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional online survey of 1109 participants was conducted during the curfew between 18th of May and 11th of June 2020. An online questionnaire included questions about the commitment to follow the precautionary measures, knowledge on COVID-19, and depression. Depression was assessed with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised method. Females, unmarried individuals, elderly persons, parents of young children, unemployed, and small families were more likely to be depressed. Education level did not explain the differences in depression. However, the more knowledge the participants had about COVID-19 the better they followed the restrictions. A regression analysis revealed that the commitment of a person to follow the restrictions increased his/her depression symptoms. Attention should be paid to different groups of people in future psychiatric planning.
Highlights
Our aim was to assess the level of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic in different sociodemographic groups and how following the precautionary measures affected depression symptoms
The level of following good disease preventing practices was moderate to high in our study. This result was expected, as public awareness has been improved in Saudi Arabia especially with the MOH adequately updated information presented on all media channels
We found a positive relationship between precautionary measures and depression
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) first emerged in December 2019 in China and caused a global health pandemic [1,2]. The total number of COVID-19-infected people has been accelerating, and the death count is exceeding previous Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) epidemics [3]. In Saudi Arabia, the first coronavirus infection was reported in March 2020 [4]. More than 470,000 people have been infected in
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