Recent literature on the mental health consequences of social distancing measures has found a substantial increase in self-reported sleep disorders, anxiety and depressive symptoms during lockdown periods. We investigate this issue with data on monthly purchases of psychotropic drugs from the universe of Italian pharmacies during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and find that purchases of mental health-related drugs have increased with respect to 2019. However, the excess volumes do not match the massive increase in anxiety and depressive disorders found in survey-based studies. We also study the interplay between mobility, measured with anonymized mobile phone data, and mental health and report no significant effect of mobility restrictions on antidepressants and anxiolytics purchases during 2020. We provide three potential mechanisms that could drive the discrepancy between self-reported mental health surveys and psychotropic drugs prescription registries: (1) stockpiling practices in the early phases of the pandemic; (2) the adoption of compensatory behavior and (3) unexpressed and unmet needs due to both demand- and supply-side shortages in healthcare services.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9651906PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22085-4DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

mental health
12
covid-19 pandemic
8
mobility restrictions
8
anxiety depressive
8
psychotropic drugs
8
psychotropic drug
4
purchases
4
drug purchases
4
purchases covid-19
4
pandemic italy
4

Similar Publications

The current study aims to determine how the interactions between practice (distributed/focused) and mental capacity (high/low) in the cloud-computing environment (CCE) affect the development of reproductive health skills and cognitive absorption. The study employed an experimental design, and it included a categorical variable for mental capacity (low/high) and an independent variable with two types of activities (distributed/focused). The research sample consisted of 240 students from the College of Science and College of Applied Medical Sciences at the University of Hail's.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The COVID-19 outbreak, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was linked to significant neurological and psychiatric manifestations. This review examines the physiopathological mechanisms underlying these neuropsychiatric outcomes and discusses current management strategies. Primarily a respiratory disease, COVID-19 frequently leads to neurological issues, including cephalalgia and migraines, loss of sensory perception, cerebrovascular accidents, and neurological impairment such as encephalopathy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The field of emotion recognition from physiological signals is a growing area of research with significant implications for both mental health monitoring and human-computer interaction. This study introduces a novel approach to detecting emotional states based on fractal analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. We employed detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), Hurst exponent estimation, and wavelet entropy calculation to extract fractal features from EDA signals obtained from the CASE dataset, which contains physiological recordings and continuous emotion annotations from 30 participants.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Personalized Clustering for Emotion Recognition Improvement.

Sensors (Basel)

December 2024

Instituto de Estudios de Género, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Calle Madrid, 126, 28903 Getafe, Spain.

Emotion recognition through artificial intelligence and smart sensing of physical and physiological signals (affective computing) is achieving very interesting results in terms of accuracy, inference times, and user-independent models. In this sense, there are applications related to the safety and well-being of people (sexual assaults, gender-based violence, children and elderly abuse, mental health, etc.) that require even more improvements.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!