More mental illness
After Corona is before therapy
A woman stands by a window in her apartment. The number of people calling in sick because of mental illness is increasing. photo
© Fabian Sommer/dpa
Anxiety, overwork, depression: Mental illnesses have increased. The health insurance company DAK calls for special attention to be paid to young people.
The pandemic is over, the protective masks are stowed in the drawer and there is far less testing. Nevertheless, the traces of the long corona phase are still evident months later. According to the health insurance company DAK Gesundheit, employees in Baden-Württemberg were absent from work more often than ever before because of depression or anxiety.
There were 248 days of absence for every 100 insured persons, which is 48 percent more than ten years ago, as the health insurance company quotes from its new Psychreport for the Southwest. In 2021 there were still 208 absent days.
Why this high, even though the worst seems to be over? When searching for clues, the experts always end up with the corona pandemic. “Mental illnesses develop rather slowly,” said Dietrich Munz, President of the State Chamber of Psychotherapists. “We therefore expected that they would continue to make themselves felt after the corona numbers had fallen.” However, mental illness is also less of a taboo subject than it used to be. “There is less stigmatization and it is talked about more openly and it is also diagnosed more frequently because those affected go to the doctor earlier.”
Corona, war and price crisis
In some cases, a burden is borne for one to two years before it breaks ground, says Gabriele Glocker from the National Association of Relatives of Mentally Ill People. “Many people, sick people and those around them, can put up with enormous pressure for a short time, but that doesn’t last,” she explains. But after Corona came the war in Ukraine, the energy debate and the price crisis. “It might be manageable individually, but it adds up and has an impact,” says Glocker. And it is always not just a sick person who is affected, it is also about friends, partners and parents.
According to the DAK report, the stress among young women between the ages of 15 and 19 has increased significantly in the past year, while among men the 35 to 39 age group has increased significantly. The healthcare sector continued to be under pressure last year. According to the DAK, the numbers in this industry were 43 percent above the average for failures.
Mental illnesses often protracted
Mental illnesses are often protracted. On average, those affected were on sick leave for 36.9 days last year, more than one in four for up to three days, and one in seven for more than 42 days. Above all, according to the report, it is depression, which is at a record high, as well as stress and adjustment disorders. Anxiety disorders had the strongest increase with 39 percent growth compared to 2021.
“We see a high number of exhaustion depressions and relief depressions when there was a susceptibility to it beforehand,” says Martin Bürgy, psychiatrist and head of the Center for Mental Health at the Stuttgart Clinic. “If relief were actually possible after the pandemic, it would become clear how stressed you actually are.” However, the statistics are not exclusively about new cases. Rather, it is often pre-existing conditions that are aggravated by external circumstances such as the pandemic and the continued stress. The number of mental illnesses has also been increasing for many years. “Corona acted like a magnifying glass,” says Bürgy.
The problem: As in many other sectors, there is a lack of technically trained young people. The number of cases is increasing, but the number of help and experts is not. This is not the only reason why the DAK calls for intervention and help much earlier. “The new high for mental illnesses in the southwest is an alarm signal for all of us,” said Siegfried Euerle, head of the DAK-Gesundheit in Baden-Württemberg.
Increasingly younger men are also affected
“In addition, younger men are increasingly absent in the middle of their working life because of these diseases.” He called for more attention to be paid to mental health issues in the workplace. “Employees must not run the risk of one day being burned out prematurely and having to get out.”
For the Psychreport, the Berlin IGES Institute evaluated the data of 275,000 DAK-insured employees in Baden-Württemberg. According to its own information, DAK-Gesundheit is the third largest statutory health insurance company in Germany with around 630,000 insured persons in the south-west.
