The mental health effects of the first two months of lockdown and social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK (June 2020)
Report from IFS which suggests: "mental health in the UK worsened substantially as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – by 8.1% on average and by much more for young adults and for women which are groups that already had lower levels of mental health before Covid-19.
Hence inequalities in mental health have been increased by the pandemic. Even larger average effects are observed for measures of mental health that capture the number problems reported or the fraction of the population reporting any frequent or severe problems, which more than doubled for some groups such as young women. It is important to control for pre-existing recent trends in mental health when attempting to understand and isolate the effects of Covid-19."
The study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, uses new data collected by the University of Essex at the end of April. The data cover nearly 12,000 people who had been asked questions about their mental health annually over several years and who were asked the same questions again this April.
Key findings
A press release with key findings can be found here: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14876
Almost a quarter of respondents reported experiencing at least one mental health problem much more than normal, up from just 10% in the most recent pre-crisis data.
An additional 7.2 million (14% of) people aged 16+ report experiencing a mental health problem ‘much more than usual’. This is over and above any changes that would have been expected given the continuation of pre-existing trends towards poorer mental health among the population overall.
The scale of this deterioration in mental health is of a magnitude unlike anything we have seen in recent years. The impact of the pandemic on overall mental health scores was nearly double the deterioration seen between 2014-15 and 2017-18. The magnitude of the effect is equivalent to the difference in mental health between the richest 20% of people and the poorest 20% in the latest pre-pandemic data.
The share of people who report experiencing at least one mental health problem ‘much more than usual’ has more than doubled, from one in ten (10%) to almost one in four (24%) of those aged 16 and over. Younger women have the highest rates of poor mental health on this measure – the prevalence in April 2020 was 35% for women aged 16-34 – but it has worsened across all age and gender groups
