IJERPH, Vol. 18, Pages 4912: Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?

IJERPH, Vol. 18, Pages 4912: Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph18094912 Authors: Cliodhna O’Connor COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople’s causal attributions and expectations regarding the trajectory of mental illness have important implications for societal stigma and therapeutic orientations. Two online experimental studies investigated whether reading about fictional cases of mental illness that were explicitly situated during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with reading about the same cases without any pandemic-related contextualisation, affected attributions and expectations about Major Depressive Disorder (Study 1) and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Study 2). Study 1 (n = 137) results showed that highlighting the onset of anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened attributions to biological causes and reduced the anticipated duration of symptoms. However, Study 2 (n = 129) revealed no effects of COVID-19 contextualisation on beliefs about the cause or course of depression. The research provides preliminary evidence that the increased incidence of mental illness duri...
Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research