COVID: “Anxious states” have not increased during pandemic, “unlike depressive episodes”

The Covid health crisis has not caused a lasting increase in anxiety disorders in the French population, contrary to what was observed for depression, concluded a study published on Tuesday, July 22 by the France Public Health Agency.

“Unlike depressive episodes whose prevalence has increased significantly between 2017 and 2021 (…), the frequency of anxious states has remained stable,” summarizes this study.

Stable figures between 2017 and 2021

The Covid pandemia, which resulted in 2020 in unprecedented health restrictions with strict confinements in many countries, is generally considered a factor that has aggravated many mental disorders.

A vast synthetic work, published in 2021 in the Lanceta, had remarkably concluded that depressed and anxious disorders are worsening as part of the pandemic.

Public Health Researchers France, therefore, sought to prove the hypothesis “according to which anxiety states could have increased after the health crisis.”

But the results are not convincing. At the end of the study, conducted by telephone survey with thousands of French on the basis of a questionnaire that measures the main anxious symptoms, the figures have generally remained the same between 2017 and 2021.

The Covid pandemia did not get worse

The seven questions asked included, for example, the frequency that the person experiences a “feeling of fear as if something horrible went (…) to happen”, or their ability to “remain in silence to do nothing and (feel) relaxed.”

The results are considered worrisome by researchers, with 12.5% of those questioned that have anxious symptoms. And correspond to social inequalities: they seem more frequent in people in financial difficulty or at a low level of education.

On the other hand, Covid’s pandemic did not aggravated things. This seems contradictory, since in the first days of the pandemic, fast studies had testified a leap in the feelings of anxiety in France.

But “the strong prevalence observed at the beginning of the pandemic phase could be transitory,” progress to the researchers, contrasting this observation with the depressive episodes that often seem to have been aggravated in a lasting way.