I challenge you — type "COVID-19 mental health" into Google, DuckDuckGo, or whatever search engine you use, and see what comes up.
If you've you gave it a go, you'll know that this and similar search phrases reveal doom-and-gloom prognoses from a whole parade of rather reputable sources, from the CDC and WHO to scientific studies, if you're looking at those. We've all heard it before, and very many of us have lived it. Life under the shadow of a global pandemic can be incredibly stressful, and can induce major depressive disorder and serious anxiety.
It's certainly an interesting question, so we'll try to take a scientific look at this.
Is there any scientific evidence that COVID-19 has had a positive impact on some people's mental health?
We'll give it to you straight — basically, no.
Available research falls into two categories. Some studies that came out at the very beginning of the pandemic, let's say before June 2020, did not yet have any data from current times to interpret, so they instead took a look at how previous (smaller-scale) pandemics and public health threats impacted people. More recent studies are starting to also have access to data from the COVID-19 pandemic itself.
One after another, they all focus on the negative impact COVID-19 has had or was likely to have on mental health.
Many studies — for instance this one, Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adult mental health — of course point out the obvious (to us, because we've lived it). It's not just the threat of a highly-contagious virus that can be deadly and still leave people with serious adverse long-term health consequences that's been making people depressed, anxious, stressed, worried, and scared.
Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, social distancing, and face masks had an impact all on their own. At the core, many mental health struggles will ultimately arise from uncertainty, reduced social contact, and of course economic hardship. This kind of struggle, the paper emphasizes, affects all segments of the population, from COVID patients to health care workers, and from people with pre-existing mental conditions to those who has a loved one seriously ill with COVID-19. Basically, everyone can be seriously emotionally harmed by the current situation.
Medical journal articles and studies specifically examining how the pandemic has affected people who already had mental health diagnoses (like this paper, and this study published in BMJ Open) have all pointed to the idea that COVID-19 and all the changes it brought worsens, rather than improves, the mental health of people with such conditions as anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding disorder, and depressive disorders.
No studies looked at the potential positive impact the pandemic could have had on certain people's mental health, however, so that could be an interesting area for future study — especially since it's not that hard to find individual stories of people who've either done quite OK or better since the pandemic started on the internet.
Why on Earth would a pandemic help improve someone's mental health?
We can think of a few ways — and people with preexisting mental health conditions I personally show have shared some of the ways in which the pandemic made life easier for them with me:
- If you were already, for whatever reason, primarily homebound before the pandemic, you may have benefited greatly from the improved infrastructure COVID-19 sped up. COVID-19 made things like virtually visiting museums and voice calls with many people at the same time, even doing things like yoga classes, much easier and more prevalent. For my friend with agoraphobia, this means that her life has become more exciting and included more travel (albeit virtual) since the onset of the pandemic.
- Because the pandemic indeed hit a lot of people very hard mentally, we're seeing more open discussions about mental health, and perhaps a reduction in stigma surrounding mental health struggles and disorders. Some people who faced mental health challenges already indeed feel less alone, now.
- The fact that working from home has become much more common and acceptable benefits some people, too. I know both autistic (not a mental health disorder, of course!) people and people with PTSD who feel their daily stress is greatly reduced because they no longer have to commute to work on public transit, or face stressful face-to-face interactions with coworkers who do not understand their needs.
- People who have been through turbulent times already may be blasé about this latest situation. The folks I know with post-traumatic stress disorder have been through worse, from war to long-term sexual assault, and have built up the resilience and perspective to simply not be that bothered by the "disaster of the day".
- People who don't like people too close to them are having a field day right now. Nuff said.
We're not the only ones who have noticed this. The BBC's Peter Goffin, who was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, describes how he felt like he's spent decades preparing for the pandemic. The "funny" thing is that the same behaviors that people with OCD often practice compulsively are now part of everyone's daily routine — only they can do it better, because they've had plenty of practice.
This same BBC article anecdotally reports that many people with OCD and anxiety disorders are now experiencing reduced feelings of worry and anxiety, largely because others are finally taking what they'd see as common-sense anti-germ measures.