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Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?

COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople’s causal attributi...

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Autor principal: O’Connor, Cliodhna
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8124589/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34063004
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094912
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author O’Connor, Cliodhna
author_facet O’Connor, Cliodhna
author_sort O’Connor, Cliodhna
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description COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople’s causal attributions and expectations regarding the trajectory of mental illness have important implications for societal stigma and therapeutic orientations. Two online experimental studies investigated whether reading about fictional cases of mental illness that were explicitly situated during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with reading about the same cases without any pandemic-related contextualisation, affected attributions and expectations about Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Study 1) and Major Depressive Disorder (Study 2). Study 1 (n = 137) results showed that highlighting the onset of anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened attributions to biological causes and reduced the anticipated duration of symptoms. However, Study 2 (n = 129) revealed no effects of COVID-19 contextualisation on beliefs about the cause or course of depression. The research provides preliminary evidence that the increased incidence of mental illness during the pandemic may reshape public beliefs about certain mental illnesses. Given the importance of public understandings for the lived experience of mentally unwell persons in society, further evidence of the range and extent of the pandemic’s effects on lay beliefs is important to inform clinical, public health and stigma-reduction initiatives.
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spelling pubmed-81245892021-05-17 Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness? O’Connor, Cliodhna Int J Environ Res Public Health Article COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople’s causal attributions and expectations regarding the trajectory of mental illness have important implications for societal stigma and therapeutic orientations. Two online experimental studies investigated whether reading about fictional cases of mental illness that were explicitly situated during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with reading about the same cases without any pandemic-related contextualisation, affected attributions and expectations about Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Study 1) and Major Depressive Disorder (Study 2). Study 1 (n = 137) results showed that highlighting the onset of anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened attributions to biological causes and reduced the anticipated duration of symptoms. However, Study 2 (n = 129) revealed no effects of COVID-19 contextualisation on beliefs about the cause or course of depression. The research provides preliminary evidence that the increased incidence of mental illness during the pandemic may reshape public beliefs about certain mental illnesses. Given the importance of public understandings for the lived experience of mentally unwell persons in society, further evidence of the range and extent of the pandemic’s effects on lay beliefs is important to inform clinical, public health and stigma-reduction initiatives. MDPI 2021-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8124589/ /pubmed/34063004 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094912 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
O’Connor, Cliodhna
Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title_full Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title_fullStr Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title_full_unstemmed Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title_short Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Lay Beliefs about the Cause and Course of Mental Illness?
title_sort has the covid-19 pandemic affected lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8124589/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34063004
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094912
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