[devxpy]

To quote -

> About 1 in 5 adults has a mental illness in any given year

This talks about people who may already have mental illness -

> Mental illness can begin at any age, from childhood through later adult years, but most cases begin earlier in life.

The OP is about new cases...

Take out a sketchpad, draw an exponential representing the # of COVID cases everyday, over 90 days. The area under that curve / 5 is the number of new mental illness patients added every 90 days. Now extrapolate that over the year, and add it to the 1/5 (Total population) number, and that's where it starts to sound alarming.

[jackfoxy]

Commenters are mostly overlooking the bidirectional element in the study.

A psychiatric diagnosis in the previous year was associated with a higher incidence of COVID-19 diagnosis (relative risk 1·65, 95% CI 1·59–1·71; p<0·0001)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

[parliament32]

Now THAT's interesting. Speculations about why? Are more anxious people more likely to get tested for covid? Depressed people more likely to not care about exposure?

[totony]

I'm pretty sure anxiety affects the immune system (a quick search seems to confirm that), so that might play a part

[Izkata]

Even the 1/5 general population has to develop it at some point. Sounds like covid patients are converging towards the normal after recovery, so I don't really see an issue here.

[SamBam]

1/5 of the general population do not develop mental illnesses within 90 days of an arbitrary starting point, unless the mental illness is extremely short-lived.

Think of the difference this way:

If 1/100 people are currently experiencing a headache, then it's also reasonable to think that 1/100 people will experience a headache tomorrow.

But if 1/100 people have an amputation, it does not follow that 1/100 people will get an amputation tomorrow, or even in the next 90 days. If 1/100 people were always getting an amputation within 90 days of any arbitrary starting point, there would be many, many more amputees around.

Mental illness being something that may lasts months to years, this certainly seems to be closer to the amputation case than the headache case. That implies that getting Covid can, indeed, be said to increase your chance of developing mental illness.

[dathinab]

No the OP is about newly diagnosed cases.

This is a major difference!

[devxpy]

Care to elaborate?

[dathinab]

It's e.g. not uncommon for people to go into some form of denial of their (new/worsens) mental illness, it they are simple not aware that a mental illness can have given effects.

This makes it super hard to differentiate between something causing mental illness and that something in some way making people being diagnosed with it.

E.g. the current works situation makes it much simpler for people to get depression and anxiety without being infected by Covid-19, but due to the circumstances if someone got a new (or worsens) mental illness and covid in 2020 it's likely that they will diagnosed the illness after having had covid even if it came from the world situation not the covid virus directly.

Example Unrelated to covid: I got diagnosed ~3years after it (slowly) started to mess up my life, but that was when it started to noticably affect my life. As far as I can tell before that I had it in a mild version for like and addition 7-10 years.

So the time where sunshine is diagnosed as mentally ill isn't necessary at all related to when that person got mentally ill.

[darkerside]

Aren't COVID patients way more likely to receive medical care than other diseases, many of whom might self treat in order to avoid contracting COVID?

[dtertman]

This helps a lot, thank you!