Associations of lockdown stringency and duration with Google searches for mental health terms during the COVID-19 pandemic: A nine-country study.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

We examined the associations of lockdown stringency and duration with Google searches for four mental health concepts (i.e., "Anxiety," "Depression," "Suicide," "Mental Health") in nine countries (i.e., Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Paraguay, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

We retrieved national-level data for each country from Google Trends and the Global Panel Database of Pandemic Policies. In our primary analysis, we used data from all countries to estimate a set of multilevel regression models examining associations of overall lockdown stringency and lockdown duration with relative search volumes for each mental health term. We repeated the models after replacing overall lockdown stringency with each of the lockdown st

SUBMITTER: de la Rosa PA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8971703 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature