A group of researchers have conducted an overview of 33 mental health studies of 132,000 people during the first year of the pandemic and found that lockdowns doubled people’s odds of experiencing mental health symptoms.
Many studies on mental health have been undertaken but the speed with which they were conducted meant that the research was “generally of poor quality” and produced very mixed findings, the authors said.
A team from Deakin University in Victoria, Australia surveyed the existing studies and found that overall, mandated social restrictions and quarantine measures made people’s mental health symptoms significantly worse.
Social restrictions also increased the risk of people experiencing symptoms of depression by over 4.5 times, stress by nearly 1.5 times, and loneliness by almost double.
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