Abstract
Increased mental-health symptoms as a reaction to stressful life events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, are common. Critically, successful adaptation helps to reduce such symptoms to baseline, preventing long-term psychiatric disorders. It is thus important to understand whether and which psychiatric symptoms show transient elevations, and which persist long-term and become chronically heightened. At particular risk for the latter trajectory are symptom dimensions directly affected by the pandemic, such as obsessive–compulsive (OC) symptoms. In this longitudinal large-scale study (N = 406), we assessed how OC, anxiety and depression symptoms changed throughout the first pandemic wave in a sample of the general UK public. We further examined how these symptoms affected pandemic-related information seeking and adherence to governmental guidelines. We show that scores in all psychiatric domains were initially elevated, but showed distinct longitudinal change patterns. Depression scores decreased, and anxiety plateaued during the first pandemic wave, while OC symptoms further increased, even after the ease of Covid-19 restrictions. These OC symptoms were directly linked to Covid-related information seeking, which gave rise to higher adherence to government guidelines. This increase of OC symptoms in this non-clinical sample shows that the domain is disproportionately affected by the pandemic. We discuss the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on public mental health, which calls for continued close observation of symptom development.
Highlights
Introduction The global coronavirus SARSCoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has created a situation of severe uncertainty and isolation, fuelled by disruptions in finance, politics, social life and healthcare
We tested the hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic was associated with an overall increase in sub-clinical psychiatric symptom scores that have been linked to obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD)
Understanding how psychiatric symptoms change throughout the Covid-19 pandemic is essential when making inferences about the crisis’ long-term mentalhealth consequences
Summary
CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has created a situation of severe uncertainty and isolation, fuelled by disruptions in finance, politics, social life and healthcare. As such, it constitutes an immense psychological challenge, especially for people’s mental health. Depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia[1,2,3] and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD)[4] were reported to experience a pandemic-related increase in symptoms. First evidence suggested a worsening of symptoms in OCD patients during the pandemic[4,13,14,15,16], the results are somewhat inconsistent (cf.14,17,18), which may be driven by the heterogeneity of the disorder or differences in underlying comorbidities
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