As time passed during the study period of March 10 to 31, symptoms of depression or anxiety appeared to worsen among participants.
Credit: Andrea MendozaNearly one-third of adults in the United States reported feeling symptoms of depression or anxiety in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a recent Penn study found.
A new study conducted by researchers at Penn, the University of Southern California, and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that about 29% of U.S. adults reported feeling symptoms of depression or anxiety during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE on Nov. 11.
The Penn-led team received and analyzed a series of survey responses from March 10 to 31 from a group of 6,585 participants. As time passed during the study period, symptoms appeared to worsen.
“We’ve had long-standing interest in how health crises affect mental health among individuals. Mostly we’ve been studying these in low- and middle-income countries," Penn demographer Hans-Peter Kohler told PennToday. "Until recently, most people thought such a profound health crisis would be unlikely to happen in a high-income context. Nevertheless, it did.”
Kohler and his research partners built their study on his past research conducted alongside assistant professor Iliana Kohler and postdoctoral fellow Fabrice Kämpfen.
"People didn’t know how the pandemic would unfold,” Iliana Kohler told PennToday. “In a way, it looks like people were foreseeing the economic impacts of the pandemic, and they were foreseeing it early.”
The study's results indicated that those more concerned with economic issues caused by COVID-19 were more likely to have deteriorating mental health. Economic concerns, rather than the increase of COVID-19 cases or separation from friends and family, were found to be the strongest indicators of symptoms of anxiety or depression in U.S. adults.
“Perceived risk of dying from COVID-19 and social distancing had less of an effect. It really seems that the economic factor plays the largest role," Kämpfen told PennToday.
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