Assessing the Impacts of COVID-19 and Social Isolation on Mental Health in the United States of America

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the world at large with over 500 million cases and over 6 million deaths reported thus far. Of those, over 85 million cases and 1 million deaths have occurred in the United States of America (USA). The mental health of the general population has been impacted by several aspects of the pandemic including lockdowns, media sensationalism, social isolation, and spread of the disease. In this paper, we examine the effect that social isolation and COVID-19 infection and related death had on the prevalence of anxiety and depression in the general population of the USA in a state-by-state multiple time-series analysis. Vector Error Correction Models are estimated and we subsequently evaluated the coefficients of the estimated models and calculated their impulse response functions for further interpretation. We found that variables related to COVID-19 overall led to an increase both anxiety and depression across the studied period, while variables related to social isolation had a varied effect depending on the state being considered. Both conclusions have important implications for future pandemics.

Understanding mental health trends during COVID-19 pandemic in the United States using network analysis

“…The variables related to social isolation in [10] were less informative to our study and seemed to vary significantly more compared to variables related to COVID-…”

“…One advantage of using sliding window and clustering analyses over the bidirectional approach taken in [10] is that we are able to see greater variability through time and across the country. Figures 1, 2, 5, and 6 in [10] show that an increase in the incidence of COVID-19 led to an increase in the percentage of individuals that reported feeling anxious/depressed in a large number of states. We can make similar conclusions based on the results in Figure 3 (a) and (b) in conjunction with Figure 4 (a) and (b).…”

“…the south cluster) in their correlation over the entire period of the analysis and we don't have to rely solely on significant results to draw our conclusions. An additional insight that the results of [10] pertains to why certain states are commonly clustered together. For example, Florida and Texas were significant in several of the analyses of the effect of COVID-19 incidence on anxiety and depression, which may indicate that their populations were responding similarly to the growing pandemic and thus explains why they are grouped together with respect to each of the variables evaluated in our study.…”

“…Fulk et. al [10] investigated the effect that several variables related to the COVID-19 pandemic had on anxiety and depression in the general population during the same time period as this study. They presented their findings in a bidirectional format and found that variables directly related to COVID-19 (i.e.…”

“…We follow the approach in Amico and Bulai [4] and study the covariance matrix of the mental health indicators (which we refer to as the “mental health functional connectome”). We then compare the results from this study with results from Fulk et al [10] that investigated the effect of several COVID-19 related indicators variables on anxiety and depression in the general population using the same data during the same time period as this study. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the methods used in the analyses, including a description of the data; Section 3 describes the results of the study.…”