Anxiety in the adult population from the onset to termination of social distancing protocols during the COVID-19: a 20-month longitudinal study

Journal article

The purpose of this study was to identify the predisposing, need, and enabling factors that predict mental health services use before and during COVID-19 in an integrated primary care network in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. This retrospective observational study examined a sample of primary care patients from January 2018 to February 2020 (i.e., pre-COVID-19) and March 2020 to December 2022 (i.e., peri- COVID-19) using electronic health record data. Mental health services use was defined as the number of appointments attended by patients. A hierarchical regression was conducted to identify predictors of mental health services use by sequentially adding sociodemographic predisposing factors, clinical need factors, and service-level enabling factors. In the pre-COVID-19 sample (N = 1070), only Asian race and non-Hispanic White race were significant predictors but only explained 6% of the variance in mental health services use, F(9, 1060) = 7.27, p \u3c .001, R2 = .06). In the peri-Covid-19 sample (N = 2723), the final model incorporating enabling factors while controlling for predisposing and need factors accounted for an additional 1% in the variance of mental health services use, F(3, 2706) = 4.32, p = .005, R2 = .06. Findings suggest that financial status, age, Asian race, non-Hispanic White race, other race excluding non-Hispanic Black race, and depression symptoms were significantly associated with increased mental health services use during COVID-19. Thus, disparities based on race and financial status may have increased during COVID-19

Authors: Hoffart, A; Bauer, DJ; Johnson, SU; Ebrahimi, OV

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Nature Research
• Journal: Scientific Reports
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 17846-17846
• Article number: 17846
• Publication date: 2022-10-25
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-22686-z
• EISSN: 2045-2322
• ISSN: 2045-2322
• Language: English
• Keywords: Outbreak; Longitudinal study; Population; Psychology; 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak; Social distance; Disease; Distancing; Internal medicine; Environmental health; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); Psychiatry; Virology; Medicine; Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); Pathology; Anxiety; Pandemic