Coronavirus and mental health: over a million cases of anxiety, depression and compulsive disorders

Genoa. Almost a year after the start of the pandemic crisis still underway, the first budgets are arriving the delicate issue of the mental balance of the people involved, or perhaps it would be better to say, upset by this health crisis. And the picture is dramatic: they would be over a million diagnosable cases of mental health decay today, between chronic anxiety, depression and post-traumatic obsessive-compulsive disorders throughout the national territory.

To put it in black and white the XII National Congress of the Italian Society of NeuroPsicoPharmacology, which took place in recent days for the first time remotely: mainly the people directly affected by the disease and the families of the victims, but also those who lost their jobs and students, would suffer mainly from these disorders.

The figures are remarkable: according to the SINPF, 32% of those who came into contact with the virus developed depressive symptoms, an incidence up to five times higher than the general population, which means that of the 2.5 million infected, about 800,000 people are affected by this disorder. Furthermore, it is estimated that at least 10% of the more than 86,000 families in which there has been a bereavement due to the covic, a case of depression has occurred.

But not only that: at risk are also the tide of new unemployed who are feared to arrive in the coming months. According to Istat’s first estimates, once state aid and the blocking of layoffs have ended, the unemployment rate could go down10% to 17%, which means about 1.8 million more people out of work. And of these it has been calculated by the SINPF that about 150 thousand will be at risk of depression, a risk that mainly affects those in the lower income bracket, under 15,000 euros a year.

To these must be added the adolescents at risk of whom today it is difficult to have a figure, being outside the economic counts and the “traditional” school context which often also had the role of “counting” hardships and situations at risk. Over two million high school students have been paying for over a year, in addition to distance learning on their skin the absence of the social coordinates they were used to. According to what was collected by the doctors of the Regina Margherita in Turin, within a year the hospitalizations for attempted suicide among adolescents would have gone from 7 to 35, or five times more, while suicidal ideation went from 10% to 80% of young patients in care. A figure confirmed by the Child Jesus of Rome who has seen over 300 cases of attempted suicides in a single year, when the average of the past years did not reach 50. Frightening figures, which sound a strong alarm bell.

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