Psychiatric Epidemiology During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Our review critically examines research on trends in mental health among US adults following the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset and makes recommendations for research on the topic. Studies comparing pre-pandemic nationally representative government surveys (“benchmark surveys”) with pandemic-era non-benchmark surveys generally estimated threefold to fourfold increases in the prevalence of adverse mental-health outcomes following the pandemic’s onset. However, studies analyzing trends in repeated waves of a single survey, which may carry a lower risk of bias, generally estimated much smaller increases in adverse outcomes. Likewise in our analysis of benchmark surveys, we estimated < 1