With the outbreak of Coronavirus disease, the world is experiencing an unprecedented pandemic situation. Global confirmed cases of COVID-19 already exceeded 163 million, global mortality surpassed 3 million, and the numbers are still increasing continuously (“Coronavirus World Map”). COVID-19 is surely a world-wide emergency that severely threatens people from a risk of infection. However, the enormous number of infections and the risk are not the sole concern of the society. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains that public actions including social distancing and restriction on outside activities became necessary to reduce the further virus dissemination (“Mental Health and Coping”). Thus, isolation at home became a common lifestyle to most people. As a result, the number of people who experienced stress, anxiety or sadness increased 33% in American society in just several months, from February to Jun, 2020. Such psychological concerns in society resulted in an increasing number of patients diagnosed with depression, a most common type of mental disorder according to Harvard Health Publishing (“What causes depression”).
In order to solve the main social problem in the status quo, it is important to find a solution for depression. To find the optimum solution, this paper aims to evaluate the urgency of solving depression related problems for public health. Furthermore, this paper aims to compare possible alternatives and find the best way to solve people’s depression in consideration of the status quo.
The research was conducted by analyzing the status quo of the pandemic situation and effectiveness of sports adjusted for the current society. Several different articles were integrated to assess the possible different alternatives that are being currently used, and to substantiate the effect of sports on depression patients. Specifically, in evaluating the positive and negative effects of medication and psychotherapy for depression patients, a different efficacy graph was analyzed to compare the effects of medication and psychotherapy with the control groups. Moreover, the impact of sports in overall depression status was evaluated by interpreting the graph and survey taken in different countries.
This article is expected to explain the status quo of people’s mental health COVID-19 pandemic situation. Moreover, it is expected that the assessment of different methods of dealing with depression will be analyzed and compared to find out the best solution for depression in current society.
<The Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic on People's Mental Health>
COVID-19, an acute respiratory syndrome which broke out roughly a year ago, has caused “a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and is presenting an unprecedented challenge to public health” according to Kimberly Chriscaden, a communication officer at World Health Organization. More importantly, COVID-19 has a “higher mortality rate than influenza in all age groups…” (“No, COVID-19”). Such a virus outbreak that resulted in a global pandemic with severe risk made people hesitate to go outside, and promoted a sedentary lifestyle, resulting in physical inactivity among many people.
As COVID-19 prolongs without showing any signs of ending, isolation at home became inevitable. Such isolation substantially impacted the general population’s psychological condition, and amplified people’s anxiety regarding mental health deterioration. Liubiana Arantes de Araujo, faculty of medicine at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, claims that the methods that were used to mitigate the risk of a pandemic such as social restrictions and school closures became the factors that hinder people’s mental health by conducting a method of reviewing databases (1). This demonstrates that spending most of the time at home for safety has brought and will bring unexpected problems to people in an unintended way. A 2021 survey regarding the impact of the pandemic indicates that among 2400 people in the UK who were both directly and indirectly impacted by the COVID-19 virus, 67% of them viewed that COVID-19 is giving a negative impact on their mental health in the long term (“Coronavirus”). Although this result of the survey might be limited to the UK, it can be applied to any other country because social distancing and staying at home are universal situations that people are currently facing. With the given sources, it is now clear that, despite the fact that several restrictions on people were intended to prevent them from the risk of infection, such policies force people to stay at home, resulting in adverse psychological effects.
Mental health deterioration, as generally referred to above, appears as diseases such as depression, anxiety, or other illnesses that accompany symptoms that immediately degrade people’s quality of life: sleep pattern modification, loss of interest, unexplained physical problems, restlessness, and memory lapse. Among different diseases, depression, or major depressive disorder, is one of the most common mental disorders that became more prevalent after the coronavirus outbreak. Along with all the symptoms described above, the impact of depression becomes much more considerable in the case of younger adults and adolescents: depression during the young adult and adolescent period hinders personality and cognitive development, which affects mental stability that leads to geriatric depression (elderly depression) for more than 50% of the cases (Guarin). Because of its both long-term and short-term effects on a people’s life along with the fact that the psychological impact gets constant and intensive throughout the pandemic period, a call for measures to remedy the symptoms of depression is imperative. Therefore, this arouses the question of what can be the most effective method to cope with depression in consideration of the current pandemic situation.
Writer: Youngjun Kim (Mark)
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