Dana G Smith
Health and science writer • PhD in 🧠 • Words in Scientific American, STAT, The Atlantic, The Guardian • Award-winning Covid-19 coverage for Elemental
Mar 9, 2021
Sandro Galea, MD, is a physician and epidemiologist who knows trauma: He has studied people’s mental health in the aftermath of, among other earth-shattering events, 9/11, hurricanes, and civil unrest. In March and April 2020, the Boston University School of Public Health dean conducted one of the first mental health surveys of Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. Galea found that in those early months, depression rates in the United States had more than tripled compared to the years prior, up from 8.5% to 27.8%.
“We were anticipating to find elevated rates, because we know that [depression increases in prevalence] from other large-scale events, but the threefold increase was surprising,” Galea says. “Typically, in general populations after these events, you’d expect about a doubling, so the threefold increase was surprising, no question.”
Anyone who’s lived through the past year could tell you that March and April were not a blip. More recent research indicates that depression rates have remained consistently elevated during the pandemic, ranging between 23.5% and 30.2%, depending on the month. The latest numbers from February place the national average at 27.9%. This data comes from theHousehold Pulse Survey, a weekly mental health screen of roughly 73,000 Americans conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau that started in April 2020. Visits to hospital emergency departments for suicide attempts and drug overdoses have also spiked, increasing by 6% and 17%, respectively, from 2019 to 2020.
“You’ve lost social contact; you may have lost loved ones; you may have lost your job. All of these things are conspiring to really negatively hit our brain.”
There’s no doubt about it — people are struggling. Just writing that statement feels like the understatement of the year. Of course we are! We’re about to enter year two of a pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans, caused chronic illness in hundreds of thousands more, and resulted in unemployment rates not seen even during the Great Depression. It should come as no surprise that a year of stress, loneliness, fear, and trauma has affected our mental well-being. But has it also affected our brains? Do the increases in psychiatric symptoms correspond to real physiological changes within our 86 billion neurons?
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My goal in writing this article is not to be a downer or to pathologize a globally traumatic event. My hope is that by laying out some of the very real changes that can take place in the brain, the very real toll that a year of stress and loneliness and loss can take, people may feel a little less abnormal or like they’re failing. What we’ve gone through has been a perfect storm of challenges for our brains, but also, as Gotlib said, depression and anxiety are not unique, and we do have treatments for them. And just as these changes from stress can occur, so can others that promote healing and resilience.
This is the first in a series of articles to mark the one-year anniversary of pandemic life and explore the toll this past year has taken on people’s mental health. Future articles will cover resilience and recovery in the brain.
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