In a new study, survey answers from the same Americans over time are looked at. It shows that at least 41% of adults in the U.S. have felt emotionally bad at least once since the coronavirus outbreak started.
There are a lot of terrible mental health problems among young adults. So the Center did four surveys with people ages 18 to 29 between March 2020 and September 2022. The results showed that 58% of people in this age group had felt very upset at least once.
The analysis shows how psychological distress among Americans can change over time. It does this using a five-item index that asks about things like loneliness, anxiety, and trouble sleeping.
21% of U.S. adults were in “high psychological distress” in the September 2022 survey. This group has made up 24% of adults in the last four surveys. But because people’s levels of distress change over time, four surveys show that 41% of Americans have had high psychological distress at least once in the last two and a half years.
Being disabled, having a low income, and being old are all strong predictors of mental distress. For example, about two-thirds (66%) of adults with a disability or health condition that keeps them from working, going to school, doing housework, or doing other things fully said they were angry at least once across the four surveys. And people with lower family incomes (53%) are more likely to have experienced high psychological distress at least once since March 2020 than people from middle-income (38%) and high-income (30%) households.
Even though many Americans had mental health problems before the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials warned at the beginning of 2020 that the pandemic could worsen those problems. Also, the effects of the outbreak have hurt some people more than others. Women, adults with lower incomes, Black and Hispanic adults, and adults with lower incomes are all among these groups.
In 2022, Americans were less and less worried about getting or spreading the coronavirus. But the coronavirus is just one thing that can make people feel stressed. There are also worries about the country’s future and the economy.
Americans’ psychological distress levels heightened by COVID
In the United States, where COVID-19 is always changing, only 35% of people have reported the same level of psychological distress in all four surveys done by the Center since March 2020. This could be high, medium, or low, though.
Instead, most people who answered (60%) had mental problems that came and went. Some people’s emotional pain got worse, but for others, it got better. In four surveys, 41% of adults in the U.S. had high psychological distress at least once, but only 6% had high distress in all four surveys. This shows how different these things can be. In all of the surveys, almost five times as many people (28%) said they were in low distress.
The index of psychological distress is based on standard psychological measures of five types of distress that a person may have felt in the last week, such as anxiety or inability to sleep. The questions are neither a clinical measure nor a diagnostic tool as they are used in this survey. Instead, they talk about how people felt in the week leading up to the interview.
Only one question is about the coronavirus outbreak. It asks how often Americans who have thought about the coronavirus outbreak have “had physical reactions like sweating, trouble breathing, nausea, or a pounding heart in the last week.” In September, when the most recent survey was done, 14% of Americans said yes to this question. When the outbreak started in March 2020, 18% of people said they had already been through this.
Sleeping problems are one of the most common signs of stress surveys look for. In the most recent survey, 64% of adults said they had trouble sleeping at least sometimes or a little bit in the past week. In addition, about 61% of the respondents said they had felt nervous, anxious, or on edge.
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Many people in the U.S. have also struggled with depression and feeling alone. In the most recent survey, 46% of adults said they had felt lonely, and 42% said they had felt depressed at least once or twice in the last week.
Even though it’s not part of the psychological distress index, all four surveys asked about good feelings. For example, a survey from September found that 78% of adults in the U.S. had felt hopeful about the future at least once or twice in the past week. But 22% of adults said that they rarely or never felt hopeful about the future in the past week.
