Mental health: COVID-19, stress, and coping

ABSTRACT

Pandemics (i.e., large-scale epidemics) are defined as outbreaks of disease over a large geographic area or over the entire world. Pandemics result in large-scale stress given the uncertainty around the duration of disease risk (Taylor, 2019). The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus two (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic of 2019, referred to typically as COVID-19, represents a public health emergency with widespread psychological consequences. In addition to job and housing insecurity, extant research on the mental health impact of the pandemic points to significant emotional distress and dysfunctional behaviors across the lifespan, difficulty coping, and increased suicidal ideation (Duan et al., 2020;Innocentiet al., 2020;Shah et al., 2020;Taylor et al., 2020a;Wang et al., 2020). The developing research on COVID-19 is well in-line with research on prior pandemics, which found that these events may trigger or exacerbate adverse mental health symptoms, particularly those related to anxiety, depressed mood, and post-traumatic stress (Taylor, 2019). Furthermore, the psychological impact of a pandemic can persist beyond the medical effects of the disease, both in the short and long term (Douglas et al., 2009;Gardner & Moallef, 2015), suggesting that the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic may last long after the disease has run its course. This chapter will explore the psychological impacts of pandemics, COVID-19 Stress Syndrome, and proposed strategies for navigating the pandemic in an attempt to provide a cursory look into the breadth and scope of pandemic-related mental health research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)