No real mental health crisis from pandemic

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Confirmed by BMJ, after surveys across high income countries across Europe and ASia

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, despite a myriad of anecdotal accounts on MN and in some other places.

I know I asked many hundreds of children myself, and found more enjoyed and benefited from lockdown than suffered because of it, and mental health charities knew at the time that suicide rates were falling, which has later been confirmed.

Some people's mental health deteriorated in the lockdowns. Some people's improved. Overall, there was a small rise in mild/moderate mental health problems being reported, while suicides decreased.

Can we stop blaming the pandemic and lockdown for poor mental health across the board now, but particularly in schools.

This article is reviewing other people's research, the researchers themselves acknowledge all sorts of limitations with the study - their search method for finding relevant studies was not peer reviewed, most of their studies had 'limitations related to study sampling frames and recruitment methods, response and follow-up rates, and missing follow-up data.' There were few studies involving people with low socioeconomic status, and there were no studies on children (ages 0-9 years).

Also most of these studies were carried out early in 2020. They say that 'only three studies assessed symptoms in the first months of the pandemic (March to June 2020) and again in late 2020 (September to November), and only one reported results from 2021.'

So you can believe a study like this, but only within it's own limitations.

So across the world MH did not appear to decline significantly based mainly on research done during lockdown itself- but that's not to say that 0-9 nine year olds in deprived areas of the UK did not have a terrible time with their MH as they were not even in the study. This is a study looking at a world trend, it's not going to reflect that in Nottingham there may have been an large increase in MH issues due to the combination of poverty and covid combined that only came to light when the kids got back to school in September.

OP , for the 15-19 age group, in 2021 suicides were actually at the highest rate in 40 years. (6.4 out of every 100,000 people)
The difference /decrease for 2020 specifically "was likely to be caused by two factors; a decrease in male suicides at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and delays in death registrations because of the pandemic." (gov suicide stats) .

All those who found great benefits from lock down life are perfectly welcome to live a lock down life.

No one is stopping you.

I believe horse riding wasn't allowed. We were allowed one short walk per day. I guess lockdown wasn't as bad if you broke the rules.

So....my interest was so piqued by this I actually have read the whole paper in my lunch hour.

Op I think you are conflating two things. The study is looking at changes in people's mental well-being not whether more people developed mental health problems. The devil is in the detail of the methodology and results reporting which I'll try and translate below:
The paper says:
Studies had to report data from cohorts comprising at least 90% of the same participants between pre-covid-19 and pandemic periods.
This means the studies they used for the analysis were all the same people (well 90%), whose measures of mental well-being were taken before and during (or after) the pandemic. So if. I asked 100 people how depressed they were pre Covid then I asked the same 100 people how depressed they were mid Covid my study would be included. But if I asked 10000 people how depressed they were at the start and a different 10000 how depressed they were after my study would not be included. The second study (if you ask enough people gives you an indication of population level chages).
The study also says:
Eligible outcomes included continuous scores on validated mental health symptom questionnaires, proportion of participants above a threshold on a validated symptom questionnaire, or proportion of participants meeting criteria for a mental disorder using a validated diagnostic interview.
AND
Change in mental health symptoms
Supplementary tables 3-5 show changes in mental health symptoms for individual studies by population category: supplementary table 3 for general mental health symptoms, supplementary table 4 for anxiety symptoms, and supplementary table 5 for depression symptoms.
AND
Among subgroups, women or female participants were the only group that experienced a worsening of symptoms across outcome domains; all by small amounts
Which basically means of the people that were being measured at the time (as part of other studies-thats what a meya analysis does or who happened to have a pre Covid and post Covid measure of their mental health) only a few got worse after Covid.
So... The study can tell us nothing about how many people people at a population level may have become mentally unwell. For that we will have to look to cohort/longitudinal studies like Alspac that track a very large number of people over a long time.

Well, it was allowed because liveries still had to care for their horses. We loaned a pony during lockdown so counted as a livery

How do you expect horses were cared for during lockdown?

Agree - hate the selfish people who say 'well I found it fine'.
My DS told me his life wasn't worth living. He missed sport and school. I became extremely worried.

There were no rules about horse riding.

We have horses, we were sensible and stayed away from the riskier stuff like jumping or cross country, but continued to school and hack as normal.

No rules were broken

Good post @hettie.

Sorry if someone has pointed this out upthread but there also tends to be significant sampling bias in social sciences research (which the authors rightly note in their limitations).

Vulnerable groups generally e.g. lower SES, BAME, etc tend to be disproportionately under represented in this type of research.

There's something really distasteful about the posts from people who enjoyed lockdown.

We all know that millions of people suffered as a result of lockdown - emotionally, physically, financially, psychiatrically, practically. Whether or not we saw lockdowns as necessary, it's impossible to deny that for the majority of the population it represented a reduction in their quality of life. They missed friends and family, missed hobbies, lost income, and some of course were murdered by abusers.

Some people had problems already that lockdown benefited (kids being bullied etc) and good luck to them, I'm glad they got some respite from their struggles.

But I find it really hard to read posts from the small minority who just loved it, because they had land and ponies and easy bloody jobs (from which they were either furloughed or allowed to do to a minimal level) , plenty of money , plenty of space etc. Do these people not see how nasty it is to gloat about what a fine old time they had? Can they not see the bigger picture?

You can't live a lockdown life. The DWP will not allow my relative with bipolar to have phone meetings and neither will other officials.
We are not all middle class people in large homes.

My kids weren't allowed to kick a football on the park, but people could ride their horses? Ah how lovely.

The rules around horses were unclear in fact. There was someone who was told they couldn't travel out of their area to look after their horse.
Scotland amazingly enough was clearer but England wasn't. I have a horse, and I'm in Scotland.
Saying you'd love another lockdown is a horrible thing to say. There were people who killed themselves because of the isolation or because they lost their businesses.
Just because you found it fine (not many people could travel to see grandparents, or had a horse) - selfish beyond belief.
I, on the other hand, had a DS with a lot of friends who missed them and who got depressed. But just because you and your daughter enjoyed it, that's fine. It sums the pro lockdowners up nicely in fact.

Lots of cmht’s still did home visits, ours did everyday. However we also very quickly had to do a risk assessment based on ever changing data at the beginning of the pandemic which was really tough. We had to individually risk assesss thousands of service users and also staff to try and make services safe and work out what characteristics made someone more vulnerable to covid such as age, race, health conditions even the weight of people, if anyone was pregnant etc then try and safely maintain face to face services using all this data. I think we did a good job supporting the most unwell of our patients in totally unprecedented times.

Ain't it just? Especially where the horse was just strategically "loaned" (borrowed, presumably) for the duration.

The ones that puzzled me were the ones who said they could now stay in all the time and not socialise.

You could always do that. Why did you need the rest of the world to shut down too?

No they can't. I have a big house, a pony and everything else - though I couldn't work at home as I work in healthcare. I hated it and felt unbelievably sorry for those that didn't have those advantages and I campaigned against it when very few people were willing to stick their neck out as well.
I know someone who killed himself as his business failed plus many other horrible things.

Well, yes it was strategic. The riding school we were members of needed people to still care and ride horses during lockdown and had to loan them out to people who could help.

So here is another little piece of anecdotal evidence. DM in a care home. Not alone, with her husband, and of course all the lovely carers. She died in Jan 2021 along with half of the residents of the home. She had endured 6 months of living hell for her, not being able to leave the home, having limited visits. Having to go into 2 week isolation every time she went out for a medical appointment. She gave up on life, and refused to sign up for the vaccine, she wanted to die. Now there's a bit of depression for you.

@TimandGinger I agree. There's a real "I'm alright Jack" attitude, and it seems more prevalent now. I think at the time people felt they couldn't admit they were enjoying it because that would have felt wrong, but now they're happy to say what a lovely time it was. Whilst many of us are still picking up the pieces. It's tone deaf and selfish.

Yes, it's mind boggling.

Exactly if people are pining for their anti social fantasies now. Just re enact it. Without the rest of us.

They make me sick. They really do. I went to the funeral of a 27 year old musician last year who killed herself because she had no work due to the lockdown, and was horrendously isolated.
I was told I was selfish to oppose the lockdown but I saw the bigger picture. The Hancock files have shown that we were correct (they weren't even following science, it was political) but it's too late.

Blimey. I wonder who would have loaned a horse out during lockdown. And yes you could ride every day as it was part of animal welfare. As you could walk your dog. My horse was used to being ridden 5 times a week. No reason why anyone shouldn't have carried on doing that. Horse riding isn't exactly close human contact although I remember people on here getting very enervated about people falling off and having to get an ambulance. Fwiw I think your sons should definitely have been allowed to play football.