key: cord-0881314-8g5zxw1n
authors: Arevalo, L Cantarero
title: Spanish adolescents’ and young adults’ coping strategies under severe lock-down due to COVID-19: a dialogical research study
date: 2021-10-20
journal: Eur J Public Health
DOI: 10.1093/eurpub/ckab164.692
sha: 175c31b8fc0825e7ea5b89a2e679397d87239417
doc_id: 881314
cord_uid: 8g5zxw1n

BACKGROUND: During spring of 2020, millions of young adults throughout the world were sent home as a measure to contain the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, Madrid became the city of the world with the highest incidence and mortality rates. By applying a phenomenological approach, this study aimed at gaining in-depth understanding of the subjective mental health experiences lived by Spanish young adults. METHODS: dialogical research was used to interact with AYA and young adults. AYA were recruited using the network of networks and snowball strategies. 36 were initially contacted and 35 decided to participate. All participants were informed of their right to stop the dialogue at any time without providing any further explanation to the researcher, and were informed of the data protection rules of the University of Copenhagen. All signed an informed consent. The 35 dialogues were held online using Zoom, recorded and saved in a secured folder.. The dialogues lasted on average 55 minutes, were transcribed with Nvivo Transcription software. The sociological theory on Resonance was used to shape specific segments of the dialogues and to analysis the data. RESULTS: 35 online dialogues with 20 adolescent girls and 15 adolescent boys aged from 17 to 23 were held from the second to the 28 of April 2020. The majority of youth did not leave their residences for 2 months. Three of them lost relatives due to COVID-19, one was admitted at the hospital and seven had relatives who contracted the disease. Different themes were brought up: 1) AYA' relations with their physical spaces and with time. 2) Relating with others. 3) Strategies to overcome sense of alienation, loss and fear and to re-find resonance. AYA living with chronic or mental diseases realized the importance of developing supportive habits and of adhering to treatments. CONCLUSIONS: Dialogical research allowed youth to reflect upon their experiences and abilities to cope with the shock a provoked by COVID-19.

University students were confronted with abrupt changes by the COVID-19 lock-down in their personal and academic lives. The ''Health in Students during the Corona pandemic'' study investigated the impact on mental health and health behaviors of Swiss university students.

April 2020 all students of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (N = 12,431) were invited to a repeated cross-sectional open cohort survey, participation ranged from T0 20% -T5 13%. Generalized anxiety (GAD-7), stress (PSS) and depression (PHQ-9) were investigated with descriptive and multivariate analyses. Latent class analyses (LCA) was applied to identify groups who differed in perception of impact on daily and student life. PHQ-9 results were compared with prepandemic data matched for age, sex and education. Results: At T0 mean age was 26.5 (sd 5.6), 69% were female. Participants were similar across all surveys. LCA yielded three classes of perceived impact: 1 (low, n = 675), 2 (moderate, n = 1098), and 3 (strong, n = 656). At T0 adjusted proportion of moderate to severe anxiety was significantly higher in class 3 (45% (95% CI: 28.0-62.0), compared to 2 (15.5%, 95% CI: 13.1-17.9) and 1 (5.1%, 95% CI: 4.7-5.6). Class 3 showed significantly higher odds of high stress levels (class 3: OR = 28.4; 95% CI: 15.5 -52.0; p = 0.000; class 2: OR = 2.8; 95% CI: 1.5 -5.3; p = 0.002) compared to other students. Anxiety and stress levels declined with time. The adjusted prevalence of depressive symptoms in females (30.8% (95% CI: 28.6-33.0)) and males (24.8% (95% CI: 21.7-28.1) was substantially higher than in a matching pre-pandemic national sample of young women (10.9% (95% CI: 8.9-13.2)) and men (8.5% (6.6-11.0)). Depressive symptoms between T0 and T3 did not decline.

Students reported high anxiety, stress and depressive symptoms during the pandemic. Depressive symptoms did not decline with time, indicating a continuing impact on mental health throughout the pandemic.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychological well-being of students in an Italian university: a webbased cross-sectional survey 

Italy was the first European country to implement a national lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide, this pandemic had a huge impact on the mental health of people in many countries causing similar reaction in terms of emotions and concerns at the population level. Our study investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychological well-being in a cohort of Italian university students.

We conducted a cross-sectional survey in the period immediately after the first lockdown through the administration of a questionnaire on the personal websites of students attending their undergraduate courses at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. We used the Patient-Health-Engagement-Scale, Self-Rating-Anxiety-Scale, and Self-Rating-Depression-Scale to assess engagement, anxiety symptoms, and depression symptoms of our sample.

The sample size was 501 subjects, of which 35.33% were classified as anxious and 72.93% as depressed. Over 90% of respondents had good understanding of the preventive measures despite over 70% suffered from the impossibility of physically seeing friends and partners. Around 55% of students would have been willing to contribute much more to face the pandemic. An increase in the occurrences of anxiety was associated with being female, being student of the Rome campus, suffering from the impossibility of attending university, being distant from colleagues, and being unable of physically seeing one's partner. Performing physical activity reduced this likelihood.

University students are at risk of psychological distress in the case of traumatic events. The evolution of the pandemic is uncertain and may have long-term effects on mental health. Therefore, it is crucial to study the most effective interventions to identify vulnerable subgroups and to plan for acute and long-term psychological services to control and reduce the burden of psychological problems. 

During spring of 2020, millions of young adults throughout the world were sent home as a measure to contain the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, Madrid became the city of the world with the highest incidence and mortality rates. By applying a phenomenological approach, this study aimed at gaining in-depth understanding of the subjective mental health experiences lived by Spanish young adults. Methods: dialogical research was used to interact with AYA and young adults. AYA were recruited using the network of networks and snowball strategies. 36 were initially contacted and 35 decided to participate. All participants were informed of their right to stop the dialogue at any time without providing any further explanation to the researcher, and were informed of the data protection rules of the University of Copenhagen. All signed an informed consent. The 35 dialogues were held online using Zoom, recorded and saved in a secured folder.. The dialogues lasted on average 55 minutes, were transcribed with Nvivo Transcription software. The sociological theory on Resonance was used to shape specific segments of the dialogues and to analysis the data. Results: 35 online dialogues with 20 adolescent girls and 15 adolescent boys aged from 17 to 23 were held from the second to the 28 of April 2020. The majority of youth did not leave their residences for 2 months. Three of them lost relatives due to COVID-19, one was admitted at the hospital and seven had relatives who contracted the disease. Different themes were brought up: 1) AYA' relations with their physical spaces and with time. 2) Relating with others. 3) Strategies to overcome sense of alienation, loss and fear and to re-find resonance. AYA living with chronic or mental diseases realized the importance of developing supportive habits and of adhering to treatments.

Dialogical research allowed youth to reflect upon their experiences and abilities to cope with the shock a provoked by COVID-19.

Mental health, particularly among young adults, has been severely affected during the COVID-19 pandemic, partially because of both forced social isolation measures and loneliness. Numerous papers on the short-term consequences of lockdown measures reported high psychological distress, as well as an increase of depressive and anxiety symptoms and psychotropic drug use. This study evaluated potential risk and protective factors, such as resilience, loneliness, social and family context, in order to detect vulnerable individuals.

This prospective longitudinal study was carried out in a twophase survey: the first one, during lockdown in Spring 2020 (T1), and, the second one, in Summer 2020 (T2), when restrictive measures were slackened. The main outcomes included the Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale. The secondary outcomes included mental health care needs (MHCN), use of psychotropic drugs and family and social contacts.

This study evaluated risks and protective factors in mental health in 825 emerging adults aged from 18 to 25 years old in Belgium and in Italy. Participants were divided into three groups according to their MHCN before and after lockdown measures. 5% of the participants experienced an increase in MHCN at T1, including the start of a psychotropic treatment. At T1, statistically significant differences were found in mean RSA total scores and RSA Perception of Self scores between groups. At T2, the group who experienced an increase in MHCN displayed a significant decrease of mean loneliness scores compared with the other groups. This decrease is linearly correlated with resilience competencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictive measures cause a negative impact on youth's mental health, particularly among vulnerable individuals. Resilience and social contacts are protective factors that need to be taken into account.

Mental disorders, multimorbidity and labor market marginalization among refugee youths in Sweden

3 Division of Insurance Medicine

The impact of resilience and loneliness during COVID-

Little is known about how disease co-occurrences with common mental disorders (CMD) associate with social integration in young refugees. We identify diagnostic groups associated with labor market marginalization (LMM) in refugees and Swedish-born with CMD and determine whether multimorbidity is associated with LMM in young refugees and Swedish-born with CMD.

This longitudinal registry-based study included adults aged 20-25 years followed from 2011-2016 in Sweden. LMM was defined as > 180 days unemployment or being granted disability pension. A multimorbidity score was derived from a network of disease co-occurrences observed in 2009-2011. Relative risks for LMM in refugees with CMD compared to Swedish-born with CMD in 114 diagnostic groups were calculated. Multivariate logistic regression was applied to estimate the odds of LMM by CMD.

Among 249,245 young adults, 2,841 (1.1%) were granted disability pension and 16,323 (6.5%) individuals experienced unemployment, 20,679 (8.3%) suffered from CMD. Most comorbid diagnostic groups were positively associated with unemployment in young refugees with CMD. Inflammatory bowel disease and acute upper respiratory disease showed the highest relative risks of unemployment for young refugees with CMD, compared to Swedish-born with CMD: RRs 6.4[3.2, 12.8], 4.0[2.6, 6.1], respectively. The multimorbidity score was associated with elevated odds for unemployment and granted disability pension in refugees with/without CMD and Swedish-