COVID didn't cause a mental health crisis

Researchers that joined the prestigious medical journal The Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Mental Health Task Force reviewed data from nearly 1,000 studies which surveyed hundreds of thousands of people from almost 100 countries. While they documented “a significant rise in psychological distress during the early months of the pandemic, which was especially pronounced among individuals who are young, female, and parents to children under 5 years of age,” they also found that “most (but not all) metrics of psychological distress returned to baseline, on average, by mid-2020.” There were no increases in suicide. Worldwide ratings of life satisfaction stayed about the same. There was little to no change in loneliness. Adolescents’ depression and anxiety generally remained stable.

“We were surprised by how well many people weathered the pandemic’s psychological challenges,” three of the report’s authors, Lara Aknin, Jamil Zaki, and Elizabeth Dunn, wrote in The Atlantic. “In order to make sense of these patterns, we looked back to a classic psychology finding: People are more resilient than they themselves realize. We imagine that negative life events—losing a job or a romantic partner—will be devastating for months or years. When people actually experience these losses, however, their misery tends to fade far faster than they imagined it would.”