A longitudinal study on depression and anxiety in college students during the first 106-days of the lengthy Argentinean quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background

The Argentinean quarantine is among the strictest and longest quarantines in the world. To determine if a worsening pattern on mental health would emerge with a prolonged quarantine duration, a longitudinal analysis pertaining to the lengthy mandatory Argentinean quarantine was conducted.

Aim

To examine depression and anxiety changes in college students, as a function of quarantine duration, demographic and health-related factors, during successive time cuts of the lengthy mandatory quarantine in Argentina.

Methods

We used a longitudinal design, N = 1492 college students. For the first measurement, successive samplings were carried out across quarantine sub-periods of up to 106-days duration. The follow-up was one month later.

Results

Particularly women, young, and having a history of mental disorder and suicidal behavior, were more depressed and anxious under mandatory restrictive quarantine conditions. Repeated measures of both depression and anxiety scores remained constantly high during the more restrictive quarantine sub-periods of up to 13 and 53-days duration, and decreased during the less restrictive quarantine sub-period of up to 106-days duration, but with small effect sizes (0.10–0.08).

Conclusions

Restrictive quarantine has negative effects on mental health outcomes. Partial spontaneous remissions of depression and anxiety symptoms may be expected with further quarantine relaxations.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• mental health
• mental disorders
• spontaneous
• young adult
• affective disorders

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Institute of Psychological Research, Faculty of Psychology, National University of Córdoba (CEIIPsi-UNC-CONICET; [email protected]), 14/02/20–23/03/20. All participants gave their informed consent for their data to be used in the research.

Author contributors

LCLS has elaborated the research project; has designed the online protocol of this research; has carried out the data collection; has prepared the dataset; has written the codes for data analyzes; has made data analyses; has written the manuscript. JCG has participated in the data collection; has revised the manuscript. SBF has participated in the writing of the manuscript; has made bibliography searches; has revised the manuscript for English grammar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset and the reproducible R code are available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2V84N.