Background The current study aimed to assess prevalence of mental disorders during Covid-19 pandemic-and respective lockdown in Germany, and potential behaviors/states that can have protective functions on preventing severe mental problems. Assessing prevalence of mental disorders, as well as to find potential protective variables is very important in order to determine people's psychological suffering. It provides the basis for teaching possible coping styles in order to prevent a major breakdown on mental health. Prevalence on mental disorders was expected to increase during the pandemic, especially depression, (general-/and health-) anxiety, panic attacks-and disorder, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Additionally, potentially protective variables, such as resilience and coping, were included. Methods N = 949 subjects completed an online-survey that asked for symptoms regarding depression, (health) anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lock-down related behavior-starting 14 days after lockdown in Germany. Results Prevalence of mental disorders in the current sample was much higher than usual prevalence of mental disorders, with 50.6% expressing at least one mental disorder. Resilience was associated with lower risks for any mental disorder (OR = 4.23, p < .0001, 95%CI = 3.21-5.57), as well as with any other measured mental illness (all ORs between = 2.82 for obsessive-compulsive disorder and OR = 41.44 for panic disorder, all p < .001). Similar results were obtained regarding coping (focus on positive). Conclusion Results are highly relevant in order to provide a glance on what substantial influence the current pandemic-and lockdown situation has on mental health across the country, and

Hallucinatory experiences are by far not limited to patients with clinical psychosis. A number of internal and external factors may bring about such experiences in healthy individuals, whereby the personality trait of (positive) schizotypy is a major mediator of individual differences. Psychotic experiences are defined as associating abnormal meaning to real but objectively irrelevant perceptions. Especially, the ambiguity of a stimulus correlates positively with the likelihood of abnormal interpretation, and intelligence is believed to have an important influence and act as protective against clinical psychosis in highly schizotypic individuals. In this study, we presented 131 healthy participants with 216 15-letter strings containing either a word, a non-word, or only random letters and asked them to report, whether or not they believed to have seen a word. The aim was to replicate findings that participants with high values in positive schizotypy on the trait-level make more false-positive errors and assess the role of stimulus-ambiguity and verbal intelligence. Additionally, we wanted to examine whether the same effect could be shown for indices of state schizotypy. Our results support findings that both state and trait positive schizotypy explain significant variance in “seeing things that are not there” and that the properties of individual stimuli have additional strong effects on the false-positive hit rates. Finally, we found that verbal intelligence and positive schizotypy interact with stimulus-ambiguity in the production of false-positive perceptions.

Schizotypy is an organization of traits mirroring psychosis-like symptoms and conveying individual psychosis-proneness. Schizotypy and schizophrenia share a genetic basis, wherefore initial schizotypy definitions considered a schizophrenic genotype as a condicio sine qua non. Since the search for a monogenetic schizotypy marker has proven in vain, it is believed that schizotypy is (genetically) based on multiple alleles, each of small effect-size. Schizophrenia may be viewed as a qualitative entity at the extreme of the schizotypy dimension. To date, however, it has not been shown that effects of individual schizotypy-related alleles or genotypes are additive, which would be necessary for the proposition of latent genetic schizotypy factors. Based on previous findings of significant associations of candidate polymorphisms with schizotypy, we chose to examine if these genetic effects were, indeed, additive regarding positive schizotypy. Using a sample of 288 healthy participants we calculated allele-wise and genotype-wise risk indices and examined, whether levels of positive schizotypy would significantly increase with genetic risk. Our findings show significant additive genetic effects of select polymorphisms on positive schizotypy and, thus, support the notion of a fully-dimensional and partially genetically based model of schizotypy.

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