Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health

• Autor(a) principal: Patronilho, João
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/161208
• topic: Health economics; Mental health; COVID-19; Depression; Anxiety; Europe; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the concern with mental health increased. Thus, the aim of this study is to evaluate the impacts of the pandemic on the prevalence of anxiety and depression. Considering this, it was used data from the European COvid Survey (ECOS) and Our World in data, including information for 9 different waves and 7 European countries. To estimate the consequences of a set of pandemic-related factors (such as the dominant variant, Oxford stringency index, number of new cases, etc.), Linear Probability Models with Fixed Effects were used, and then different approaches were applied to test the robustness of the results. The main conclusion was that, in fact, the pandemic impacted negatively on mental health but was not the main cause behind the presence of extreme cases of anxiety or depression.