The consequences of a year of the COVID-19 pandemic for the mental health of young adult twins in England and Wales.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all our lives, not only through the infection itself, but also through the measures taken to control the virus’s spread (e.g., lockdown). Here we investigated how the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented lockdown affected the mental health of young adults in England and Wales. We compared the mental health symptoms of up to 4,000 twins in their mid-twenties in 2018 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (T1) to those in a four-wave longitudinal data collection during the pandemic in April, July, and October 2020, and in March 2021 (T2-T5). The average changes in mental health were small-to-medium and mainly occurred from 2018 (T1) to March 2020 (T2, one month following the start of lockdown; average Cohen d=0.14). Despite the expectation of catastrophic effects

SUBMITTER: Rimfeld K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8509105 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature