This study carried out a survey investigating the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on young adults’ mental health. The researchers wanted to better understand how people coped during this period, what helped them and how this can be translated into public health messaging to provide better support in potential future pandemics.
Summary
This study collected data on a sample of 1,000 young adults to track their mental health at the initial outbreak of the pandemic. The findings showed that young adults were significantly more distressed and less psychologically well and participants resilience (abilities that would usually help them to cope during stressful events) were not protecting them from the unique circumstances that occurred over the pandemic.
Project aims
To understand how the pandemic affected young adults mental health, this study invited back participants from the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN) that collected data each year (in 3 intervals) from a general sample of 2,403 teenagers and young people (aged 14-24) from the London and Cambridgeshire areas. In this geographic area, the study recruited a representative sample across the whole population including ethnicity, county of birth, deprivation and gender. The NSPN study results included rich data amongst others tracking the participants’ mental health and their developmental changes through adolescence over 2012-2018. This project was in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, University College London and the University of Cambridge, find out more here.
Key findings
1) People were more distressed and less psychology well during the initial outbreak of the pandemic.
The research team were alarmed by the rise of people with very serious mental health issues, which would mean that they would severely struggle with everyday life. About 9% of the sample had serious mental health issues, which is an increase in 3% compared to before the pandemic. This translates to 1 in 10 (10%) of their data sample with serious impediment.
2) Close to 30% had levels of anxiety and depression thresholds that would make them eligible for talking therapy.
The data assessing whether the participants would meet the threshold to qualify for talking therapy through the NHS was added during the pandemic (as it involves a specific set of scales to asses this). Although the research team cannot compare this data with data from before the pandemic and assess if there is an increase, 30% of the sample is more compared to what other papers with similar samples report before the pandemic.
3) The study found that the resilience factors, which would normally protect people against ill mental health, were not protective.
There is a multitude of changeable and unchangeable factors that contribute to the way someone withstands adversity and potentially grows despite life’s downturns, often referred to as resilience. It is often recorded that resilience factors such as, high levels of family and friendship support and good self-esteem are protective when coping with stressful or potentially traumatic events they used data collected on participants’ resilience collected before the pandemic to assess to which extent these would be helping young adults to cope with the initial outbreak of the pandemic. However, the research team found that in this unique circumstance, these resilience factors didn’t make a difference. The proactive aspect of these resilience factors were mild.
4) Participants who had a previous diagnosis of depression or an anxiety condition were disproportionately affected.
It was reported that people with a previous diagnosis of any health condition which in this sample was largely driven by a diagnosis of depression and anxiety were impacted the most. They were disproportionately distressed, compared to someone that had not previously been diagnosed with these conditions.
What do these findings mean?
The findings were very important as they revealed that at a time when young adults’ were more distressed and less psychologically well, mental health care services were largely inaccessible, either having limited access or were not available.
There is still much to find out, regarding the long-term effects of mental health service closures i.e. the impact on waiting lists for services due to lockdown closures. This is an important finding in terms of understanding risk factors.
For more information on the findings, read the full report here.
What next?
This summer (July - October 2022), the research team invited participants back to see how young adults have been doing two and a half years after the initial outbreak. This new project will revisit the participants resilience and see if they were beneficial over the long term. They may not of had much significant impact in the short term, but it is not yet known if they had long term impact. Additionally, the researchers carried out 30 interviews, choosing people from the sample who represent a diverse range of voices, to further understand the experiences of young adults during this unprecedented time in UK history.
The research team hope to find out who the people are that are still struggling with their mental health to see how they can be supported, while also finding out who in the sample is doing well and why, to find out what these factors are and how they can transform this into public messaging to help people cope in future pandemics.
Who was involved
Principal investigator: Anna Wiedemann, PhD Student, University of Cambridge
Prof Peter Jones, University of Cambridge
Contact us
Anna Wiedemann, University of Cambridge
Email: aw778@medschl.cam.ac.uk
