The COVID-19 pandemic looks set to create a mental health crisis affecting young people in the UK, and experts at Swansea University Medical School are finding out how best to deal with it.
The study is being supported by SAIL (Secure Anonymous Information Linkage) Databank based at Swansea University Medical School. It is a world-leading, population databank, entrusted by the Welsh NHS to safely store the Welsh population’s health data, collected routinely by GPs and hospitals.
The authors had analysed 850,000, anonymised, individual patient records within SAIL Databank to look for an association between age and survival rates against an index of comorbidities. They also examined 145 patients within SAIL Databank who had ‘influenza’ recorded as the cause of death for the year 2011.
Over 4100 people have responded to the MS Register initial (baseline) survey, 2000 of these people have gone on to answer a follow up survey. Two hundred people who have told us that they have a confirmed (by lab test or been told by a health care professional) or suspected case of coronavirus.
Governments need to give ‘urgent consideration’ to their public health response to prevent any possible impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the number of suicides, experts warn.
A new paper, published today in The Lancet Psychiatry, highlights an urgent need to tackle the harmful impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and potentially the brain and calls for research on these areas to be central to the global response to the pandemic.
