A report was published in The Lancet on November 9, 2020, explaining that 18% of people with Covid-19 had developed a mental health problem within three months of illness.
Mental health issues after Covid-19
Researchers from the University of Oxford and the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Center studied the medical records of 69 million people in the United States and, 62,000 of them had I at Covid-19.
Scientists have thus noticed that 6% of adults who had had Covid-19 had developed, for the first time, a disorder of mental healthsuch as the Depression or anxiety within 90 days of illness. In addition, older patients seem to have a risk two to three times higher to develop dementia.
How Covid-19 affects the mind?
This analysis can be explained by the fact that contracting a life-threatening disease (Covid-19) can cause stress and of anxiety. Indeed, Jessica Stern, PhD, psychologist and assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, said: “In view of the novelty and the magnitude of the pandemicthere is little or no framework that could help manage the disease in terms of health, lifestyle and society.
Also, recovering from the virus can have an effect on the mind, as it can be exhausting depending on the severity of the symptoms. For some people, it takes months to fully recover from Covid-19 and some patients have symptoms for several months, which makes it difficult to return to normal without too much stress.