Covid: "Anxiety states" have not increased during the pandemic, "unlike depressive episodes"

The Covid health crisis has not caused a lasting increase in anxiety disorders in the French population, contrary to what has been observed for depression, concludes a study published this Tuesday, July 22, by the French Public Health agency.

"Unlike depressive episodes, the prevalence of which increased significantly between 2017 and 2021 (...), the frequency of anxiety states remained stable," summarizes this study.

The Covid pandemic, which in 2020 resulted in unprecedented health restrictions with strict lockdowns in many countries, is generally considered to have aggravated many mental health disorders.

A large-scale synthesis work, published in 2021 in The Lancet , concluded in particular that there was a worsening of depressive and anxiety disorders in the context of the pandemic.

Researchers from Public Health France therefore sought to test the hypothesis "that anxiety states could have increased following the health crisis."

But the results are not conclusive. At the end of the study, conducted through a telephone survey of thousands of French people based on a questionnaire measuring the main symptoms of anxiety, the figures remained broadly the same between 2017 and 2021.

The seven questions included, for example, how often the person experiences a "feeling of fear as if something horrible is going to (...) happen," or their ability to "sit quietly and do nothing and feel relaxed."

The results are considered worrying by the researchers, with 12.5% of those surveyed experiencing anxiety symptoms. And they reflect social inequalities: they appear to be more common among people experiencing financial difficulties or with low levels of education.

On the other hand, the Covid pandemic has not made things worse. This seems counterintuitive, given that in the early days of the pandemic, rapid studies had shown a surge in feelings of anxiety in France.

But "the high prevalence observed at the beginning of the pandemic phase may have been transitory," the researchers suggest, contrasting this observation with depressive episodes, which often seem to have been aggravated in a lasting manner.