Locked down in distress: a quasi-experimental estimation of the mental-health fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

An extensive literature documents the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, while a nascent one is beginning to detail the mental health impact. A limitation of existing work is that reported findings generally cannot be taken as causal estimates. In this study, we use a large-scale longitudinal survey coupled with a differences-in-differences research design to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the United Kingdom. We report substantial increases in psychological distress for the population overall during the first wave. These impacts were, however, not uniformly distributed with the costs in terms of mental health being much more pronounced for females, younger cohorts, the BAME community, and migrants. We also looked beyond socio-demographics to identify characteristics of the individual and their living environment which can predict who was least resilient to the mental health effects associated with the first wave. We find that people with financial worries, feeling lonely or living in overcrowded dwellings experienced significantly worse mental health deterioration during the first wave, ceteris paribus.