User:Ebaugher1/Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

Added to the fear of contracting the virus in a pandemic such as COVID-19 are the significant changes to our daily lives as our movements are restricted in support of efforts to contain and slow down the spread of the virus. While having close contact with patients throughout their work days, health care workers are over two times as likely to contract Covid-19. Faced with new realities of working from home, temporary unemployment, home-schooling of children, and lack of physical contact with other family members, friends and colleagues, it is important that we look after our mental, as well as our physical, health. In order to take care of our own health, professionals suggest implementing what they call "psychological PPE" into our lives. These habits include eating healthy foods, developing healthy coping mechanisms, and practicing mindfulness and relaxation methods.

Anxiety and Depression
From the start, nurses have always had a stressful job of taking care of patients and juggling long shifts in the hospital. Unfortunately, their hours increased even more during COVID-19, in which many nurses had a huge increase in anxiety. Cases of anxiety and depression within healthcare workers that interact with COVID-19 patients has increased by 1.57% and 1.52% respectively. If untreated, anxiety and depression can lead to more severe mental and physical health outcomes. A researcher, named Labrague, discovered that nurses who work in the frontline are more prone to mental and psychological issues, such as higher rates of anxiety, emotional exhaustion, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Some nurses had an increase in stress due to treating multiple patients at once or not having enough personal protective equipment. Consequently, they experienced a 1.5 increase in anxiety from COVID-19 than before.

Another researcher named Kim conducted a cross-sectional study by using an online survey in Southern California where the experiment studied stress before and after the pandemic. The study used the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale to learn psychological stress and resilience in the nurses. The experiment concluded that nurses reported feeling moderate and high levels of stress compared to before the pandemic.

Post-traumatic stress disorder
There has been a particular concern for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as the potential for medical workers and COVID–19 patients to develop PTSD-like symptoms. In late March 2020, researchers in China found that, based on a PTSD checklist questionnaire provided to 714 discharged COVID–19 patients, 96.2% had serious prevalent PTSD symptoms. Additionally, there is a significant increase in PTSD symptoms and diagnosis among nurses who are regularly working with COVID-19 patients.