The COVID-19 pandemic has left few lives untouched, with the virus infecting more than 50 million people worldwide (as of November 2020), and prompting widespread lockdowns across countries. When the pandemic first began, COVID-19 was poorly understood, and the focus was rightfully on saving as many lives as possible. After the initial shock and confusion began to subside, debates sprung up about what effect the pandemic may have on mental health. Indeed, recent research suggests that experience of COVID-19 may increase the risk of developing a mental illness.
Yet for all its discussion in the newspapers and online, the conversation around COVID-19 and mental health frequently misses a key question: how does COVID-19 affect people who were living with mental illness before the pandemic began? We already know that living with a mental illness increases the risk of experiencing some physical illnesses, such as severe infections. Could this pattern be the same with COVID-19? To answer this question, Yang et al. used UK Biobank, a large dataset of health information about people living in England, Scotland and Wales. From the UK Biobank, they identified which people had received care for mental health conditions before the pandemic started. Crucially, they then compared populations with and without pre-pandemic diagnoses of mental illness on subsequent risks associated with COVID-19.
The researchers found that people with mental illness were more likely than people without mental illness to be infected with and require hospital care for COVID-19, and twice as likely to die from COVID-19. This effect was not due to other COVID-19 risk factors, such as age, gender, or socioeconomic circumstances. The researchers also found that whilst the risk of COVID-19 was similar across different mental health conditions, people with multiple mental health conditions had a higher risk than those with just one.
When the researchers carried out the same analysis with non-COVID-19 infections, they found a similar pattern; experience of mental illness was linked to a higher risk of non-COVID-19 infection. It is possible that the increased risk of COVID-19 amongst people with mental illness might be due to the same things that increase the risk of other physical illnesses in these individuals. This highlights the importance of CoMorMent’s wider research scheme, which is currently investigating various explanations for why these links exist.
