Change in mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal study of residents of Indian metropolitan cities

Abstract

Background

Initial studies have reported an increase in the incidence of mental health problems during the early months of COVID-19. Longitudinal studies of changes in mental health undertaken in Low and Middle Income countries during the pandemic remains an under-researched area.

Aims

The current study examines changes in mental health among adult residents of metropolitan cities of India, a middle-income country reporting the second-highest COVID cases and third-highest fatalities, during the pandemic.

Method

Data was collected, based on a telephonic survey using the internationally accepted abridged Depression Anxiety Stress schedule (DASS-21), in August and September 2020 and July-August 2021. The sample size is 994. The data was analysed using an ordered logit model.

Results

At the onset of the pandemic, high levels of anxiety, stress and depression prevailed; their levels reduced after one year. Respondents who have experienced a decline in economic fortunes, have family members with pre-existing co-morbidity or had COVID in the family are significantly less likely to report improvement in mental health; less-educated respondents are also vulnerable.

Conclusions

Specific sub-groups, identified as at risk, need monitoring and continued provisioning of tailor-made mental health services addressing their specific needs. Relief measures targeting economically affected households are also required.

Keywords:

• Anxiety
• depression
• stress
• India

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors remain the liability of the authors. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Ethical approval

The Institutional Ethics Committee of Presidency University, the institute hosting the study provided the ethical clearance to conduct the study ((PU/IEC(H)/PROV CL/M-01/2020)). The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. Informed verbal consent was obtained from respondents.

Author contributions

The authors shared equally in collection, cleaning, editing, and analysis of data, and in drafting the paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

An anonymised version of the data set is available from Mendeley. Husain Z, Ghosh S, Dutta M and Dutta SS (2022) “Mental health in India metro cities: Longitudinal data”, Mendeley Data, V1, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/45g49shf4v.1.

Notes

1 India has reported the second-highest number of patients of SARS-CoV-2 (42.89 million) and third-highest fatalities (0.51 million) in the world as of 25 February 2022 (Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ accessed on 25/02/2022).

2 Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are social groups officially identified by the Government of India as socially marginalized and economically disadvantaged and in need of special protection from social injustice and exploitation. The so-called (as referred to in the Indian Constitution and by the national and regional governments) “Other Backward Classes” (sic) refer to other social groups who are socially and educationally marginalised. A comprehensive list of all sub-groups who comprise Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes is maintained by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India.

3 Secondary and higher secondary level of education corresponds to 10 and 12 years of schooling, respectively.

4 Positional objective refers to the influence of the context in which the apparent objectivity of an agent is influenced by his/her social context. In India, poor households and socially disadvantaged groups had been badly hit by economic measures like demonetisation and the slowdown of the Indian economy; the pandemic increased psychological pressure marginally.

5 One in seven Indians have a mental disorder of varying severity (Sagar et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.