I had 4 friends tell me about their mental health collapsing since the April lockdowns. 2 have started taking lots of drugs.
Heck before I started this new job, I might be technically depressed. I had never felt like that before.
1) Are we seeing a side-effect of bothering to look for mental illness in a generally-underdiagnosed population? Maybe most people have a bit, and scrutinizing people that ended up in the hospital is finding things that most mental health research participants aren't screened for.
2) I don't have a mechanism in mind, but it's always important to filter for correlation without causation, or even for reverse-causation; is there something about predisposition for mental illness that makes one more susceptible to COVID?
3) COVID hits an elderly population harder, and age is already correlated with mental illness. How did they control for age?