We caught up with Dr Katherine Young, who leads an MQ-funded study about depression and anxiety in young people during COVID-19 and beyond. She and her colleagues at King's College London have been trying to better understand how the pandemic has impacted people's mental health, which groups are most at risk for developing mental health problems.
Could you tell us about your research and what you have found so far?
So my research is focusing on the mental health impact of the pandemic. While the pandemic has been ongoing, we've been focusing on analysing the data we collected since April 2020. We've been collecting questionnaires throughout the pandemic, asking lots of different people about how their mental health has been affected in the past 18 months.
Initially, we were looking at the pandemic's short term effects; how did people's depression, anxiety, and symptoms of PTSD change in the first few months?
Our research showed there wasn't a massive shift in mental health from before to during the pandemic. But what we did find is that different groups of people have been affected in different ways. Some groups of individuals are particularly at risk of experiencing a worsening of their mental health. This included young people, mainly those aged 16 to 25. They were more likely to have experienced more significant symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD from before through to the early months of the pandemic.
We also see similar effects in women compared to men and people with prior mental health problems. These groups were at greater risk of worsening mental health during the early months of the pandemic.
We've also been thinking about the longer-term effects of the pandemic. We've been conducting questionnaires every month for about a year and a half. Now we're starting to model the long-term impact on people's mental health. We've been thinking about not just was there an increased initial wave of anxiety, for example, but how are people doing one year later? How are they coping? How are they adapting? How are they adjusting? So we're now starting to look at 12 months of data mapped out from April last year until April this year and starting to look at the different patterns and different ways people have been responding.
How do you involve young people with the design of your study?
Yeah, that's something we've actually done quite a lot recently. Once the study became funded by MQ, we have a lot more opportunities to engage with young people. Our current focus is thinking about the role of stress in the development of depression and anxiety. Many people have experienced heightened stress over the last year and a half. But, especially young people, with all the uncertainties around exams, education and employment opportunities.
We've been focusing on the stressors that people experience but also how they respond to the stress. And there are lots of questionnaires that we could ask about stress, but we wanted to make sure that these questionnaires felt relevant to young people.
When designing and developing a new stress measure to add to our questionnaires, we ran a series of events, culminating in a focus group with young people. We brainstormed a few ideas, and we brought them to a panel of our participants, and they gave us feedback.
We also had a focus group where we discussed different issues affecting people's stress levels and how they respond to those stressors. For example, what did they think about those stressors in the longer term? We were thinking about the different ways that people try and cope with those stressors, healthy or otherwise.
As a result of that focus group, we changed our questionnaires quite a bit to add new questions about different themes that came up during those sessions. It's been an informative process for us so far. We're hoping to continue engaging young people as we start to get data and think about the results.
What could your research mean for young people affected by depression and anxiety?
Thinking about the impact of our research is, as always, a big priority. One of the things we've been doing so far is to contribute to several parliamentary and government reports on the mental health impact of the pandemic. We've been highlighting that young people are especially at high risk.
By understanding more about how stress leads to depression and anxiety, we hope to better inform why some people respond in certain ways to stress and go on to experience problems, but others seem to be more resilient. We want to use that information to inform people more about what they can be doing as they experience stress and support young people through interventions, preventative strategies, and education.
And what motivated you to research this area in the first place?
I think I've always had a long-standing interest in psychology. Like a lot of us, I'm just fascinated by understanding other people. We can all relate to the idea of anxiety and depression, but for some people, it becomes a persistent problem that can have a long-term impact on their lives. In contrast, other people have shorter periods or can be more resilient to things. It fascinates me how we can understand and learn from those who seem to adapt and respond and use that information to help support other people with more long-term problems.
Thank you so much for speaking with us today - it's been so informative to learn more about your study.
Thank you so much for having me.
