1 in 5 COVID-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days, according to study

People who have had COVID-19 may have an increased risk of being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder such as anxiety or depression, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at the medical records of 69 million people in the United States between Jan. 20 and Aug. 1. The data included 62,000 people who contracted COVID-19, as part of what the authors described as the largest study so far on links between coronavirus and mental health challenges.

In the three months following testing positive for COVID-19, almost one in five survivors (18%) were found to get a psychiatric diagnosis. This is about twice as likely as for other groups of patients with different illnesses and conditions analyzed as part of the study over the same period.

The researchers from the University of Oxford compared psychiatric diagnoses in COVID-19 survivors with patients who had influenza, other respiratory tract infections, skin infections, large bone fractures, gallstones and kidney stones.

“The study reports that patients have a somewhat higher risk of being diagnosed with a psychiatric illness, mainly anxiety or depression, after a COVID-19 diagnosis than after certain other medical events,” said David Curtis, retired consultant psychiatrist and honorary professor at University College London and Queen Mary University of London, in a statement.

“For example, they show that there is an 18% chance of getting a psychiatric diagnosis after COVID-19 compared with 13% after influenza,” Curtis, who wasn’t involved in the research, told the Science Media Centre in London.

“It’s difficult to judge the importance of these findings. These psychiatric diagnoses get made quite commonly when people present to doctors, and it may be unsurprising that this happens a bit more often in people with COVID-19, who may understandably have been worried that they might become seriously unwell and who will also have had to endure a period of isolation.”

For Marcus Tomoff, the physical pain of COVID-19 was just the start of not knowing what to do.

“We’re still in the unknown, and it really doesn’t help the mental factor,” Tomoff told WINK News.

Tomoff watched his loved ones contract COVID-19 too.

“No one wants to see this happen to their grandparent or to their family members,” Tomoff said.

Tomoff may be a survivor of COVID-19, but he said it does not eliminate some of the social stigma.

“I’m treated like a leper. People stay away from me,” he said. “I’ve also been in contact with a mental therapist. It’s kind of hard to say this, but I’ve been depressed through all of this.”

Angela Lopez, with the David Lawrence Center told WINK News, to help survivors recover, empathy goes a long way.

“These survivors of COVID are our neighbors, friends, family members, parents, grandparents,” Lopez said. “So they shouldn’t be tainted as being seen as contagious for the rest of their lives … Provide some acceptance and hope to them.”

“I wish people showed empathy during this, and it hurts so much,” Tomoff told WINK News.

The study, which was published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry on Monday, didn’t look at the reasons or mechanisms that could explain the link between contracting COVID-19 and a psychiatric diagnosis.

It could be explained by several factors including a direct neurological or biological effect of the virus, the drugs used to treat it, the worry and anxiety caused by contracting the disease and wider concerns about the pandemic, said study author Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Warneford Hospital.

It’s also possible that the data in the electronic medical records collated by the TriNetX Analytics Network didn’t adequately capture socioeconomic or behavioral factors that might explain the link.

“We need to be cautious in our interpretation and unpick this important question,” Harrison said in a news briefing.

MORE:

• Bidirectional associations between COVID-19 and psychiatric disorder: retrospective cohort studies of 62 354 COVID-19 cases in the USA
• David Lawrence Centers For Behavioral Health

Need for long-term data

In the period between 14 and 90 days after a COVID-19 diagnosis, 5.8% of survivors in the study had their first recorded diagnosis of psychiatric illness compared with 2.5% to 3.4% of patients in the comparison groups. Thus, adults have an approximately doubled risk of being newly diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder after a Covid-19 diagnosis, the study said.

Having a psychiatric disorder in the previous year was linked with an increased chance of getting COVID-19, the study also found. This risk was independent of known physical health risk factors for COVID-19, such as obesity, but could be explained by possible socioeconomic factors.

The researchers did not include mental health symptoms that appeared during the first two weeks such as delirium or other transient cognitive impairments. Other studies have found that delirium and agitation may be common in hospitalized coronavirus patients.

Medical experts said that the study had limitations. In particular, the follow-up period was only 90 days.

“Does distress persist when there is no life-threatening infectious disease proliferating? This study does not offer long-term data — this should be at the forefront of our minds when interpreting the findings — it cannot predict psychiatric outcomes at one year follow up and does not account for worrying post-COVID physical symptoms that may be distressing,” Jo Daniels, a senior lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, told the SMC.

The study, Daniels said, didn’t note what proportion of COVI-19 survivors in the study had ongoing long COVID-19 symptoms, which are known to be associated with disabling and distressing symptoms.

Dame Til Wykes, the vice dean of psychology and systems sciences at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, said we needed to develop as many different, accessible forms of mental health support as possible.

“We know from previous pandemics that mental health difficulties usually follow in survivors, and this study shows the same pattern after COVID-19, so it is not unexpected.

But, though this is not a new finding, the data and the care with the analysis gives us more confidence in their results.”