A longitudinal analysis of 15 countries (including Italy) shows how mental health decreased during Covid-19, to a greater degree the greater the restrictions, such as closures and social distancing. The study of Lancet it is added to that of the WHO, which already in March highlighted the danger especially for the youngest.
Social distancing was the worst restriction, among the measures imposed by governments to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, for the mental health of citizens. This says a comparative study published in The Lancet on April 21. Man is not a solitary animal, the relational dimension is inherent in human nature, which has been superficially forgotten by many, too many, governments in recent years.
I study from Lancet – “Policy stringency and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries” – shows precisely how the mental health of many has decreased during the pandemic, while experts ask governments to act promptly and effectively as soon as possible, if irreparable consequences are to be avoided.
The European Parliamentalready last October, following a discussion with various experts, he had invited the governments of the European Union countries to carefully address the spread of mental illness caused by too restrictive measures imposed on citizens.
For the study, researchers collected mental health data by tracking citizen behavior in the period of Covid-19; data processed by Imperial College London with two different mental health measures: psychological distress and life assessment. Using a severity index, to precisely assess the severity of the measures imposed by governments to deal with the pandemic, the authors divided the countries into two categories: those with strategies for “eliminating” the pandemic (Australia, South Korea, Japan and Singapore) and those with “mitigation” strategies (Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden).
In the Paesi with a “mitigation” strategy, including Italy, which provided for intermittent closures (in workplaces and schools, in social distancing, in the use of mandatory masks and in the prohibitions of public gatherings), the researchers verified an increase in damage to mental health, but to a lesser extent than the first group of countries, which have adopted more coercive measures of prolonged isolation. “Mitigation strategies may be associated with worse mental health outcomes only in part, because only containment measures such as long periods of physical isolation and distancing can prevent and sometimes destroy social relationships,” said the co-author Rafael Goldszmidt.
L’Oworld health organization he had already warned last March 2 that the impact on mental health, due to the lockdowns, affected various social groups. The WHO scientific report, “Mental health and COVID-19: Early evidence of the pandemic’s impact”, demonstrates that one of the main reasons for increased stress and mental distress is linked to social isolation. The WHO study shows how the pandemic has affected the mental health of young people in particular, who are disproportionately at risk of suicidal and self-harming behaviors. Imposing isolation and distancing on young people, in the age of growth, personality formation and education in self-awareness, was a devastating and objectively malevolent choice towards the citizens of tomorrow.
As for ours Paese, a series of recent expert interventions on the consequences that the restrictions and isolation imposed by the anti-Covid measures have had on children and young people, should alarm us. A recent article by Dr. Sara Uccella, specialist in Child Neuropsychiatry at the Gaslini Pediatric Hospital in Genoa, and by Dr. Maria Pontillo, psychologist and psychotherapist at the Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome, describes the “indirect pandemic” that affects children, teenagers and young Italians: + 84% of accesses to pediatric emergency rooms for neuropsychiatric disorders between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. “The exclusion from the usual social interaction has triggered problems related to mood and suicidality or eating disorders and rekindled in many they have the ominously welcoming charm of drugs, ”they say.
Doctor Stefano Vicari, infantile neuropsychiatrist of the Child Jesus, in recent days denounced that compared to the pre-pandemic period the cases taken in charge by the pediatric hospital have increased by more than 30% (cases of hospitalization in the ward) and anticipated a study being published (“Psychiatric emergency for psychopathological disorders and self-injurious behaviors in Italian children and adolescents during COVID-19”), where the data of the two lockdowns (the first total and the second partial) are compared with respect to the period prior to the outbreak of the pandemic and how restrictive measures and distancing have caused disruption in the mental health of children, teenagers and young people. The social disasters of the Conte-Speranza-Azzolina management, and beyond, we will pay for a long time …
