Abstract
In March 2020, the World Health Organization announced the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic and restrictive measures were enacted by the Governments to fight the spread of the virus. In Italy, these measures included a nationwide lockdown, with limited exceptions including grocery shopping, certain work activities, and healthcare. Consistently with findings from previous studies investigating the psychological impact of similar pandemics [e.g., Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)], there is evidence that Covid-19 is associated with negative mental health outcomes. Given this background, we conducted a cross-sectional study aimed at investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent restrictive measures imposed by the Government on the psychological health of Italian men and women aged = 18 years and living in Lombardy, one of the worst-hit regions. The study also aimed at identifying what factors are associated with specific psychological outcomes. Thus, we developed an online survey that included a researcher-made questionnaire to collect sociodemographic, household, general health, and pandemic-related information. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and the Perceived Stress Scale were used to assess anxiety, depression, and perceived stress, respectively. We found that younger age, greater concerns about the pandemic, female gender, being unmarried, not having children, and being a student were associated with worse psychological health. These findings may provide further insight into the risk factors associated with negative psychological outcomes during the current pandemic, with identification of vulnerable groups. This body of evidence may help professionals implement targeted psychosocial treatment and prevention programs.
Highlights
Since December 2019, when the first cases were reported in the city of Wuhan, China, the Covid-19 outbreak has spread worldwide, facilitated by the contagiousness of asymptomatic individuals, as well as by international travels (Matias et al, 2020; Vigo et al, 2020)
Considering the cutoffs of these three questionnaires, we found that 18.5% of the participants reported clinically significant anxiety, 17.6% had clinical depression, while moderate levels of perceived stress were reported by most participants (96%)
We found that younger age was associated with higher anxiety, depression, and perceived stress (Ps < 0.001)
Summary
Since December 2019, when the first cases were reported in the city of Wuhan, China, the Covid-19 outbreak has spread worldwide, facilitated by the contagiousness of asymptomatic individuals, as well as by international travels (Matias et al, 2020; Vigo et al, 2020). Besides the fact that viral outbreaks represent a severe threat to people’s lives, the adverse psychological effects of pandemics such as Covid-19 derive from the consequent economic crisis, with millions of people left out of work or at risk of losing their job (Vigo et al, 2020). For all these reasons, the psychological burden of pandemics has been referred to as a “parallel epidemic” (Yao et al, 2020)
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