A study published this Tuesday, July 22 by the Public Health Agency France indicates a stagnation of “anxiety states” figures, generally remained the same between 2017 and 2021.
The COVID’s health crisis has not caused a lasting increase in anxiety disorders in the French population, contrary to what was observed for depression, concluded a study published this Tuesday, July 22 by the Public Health Agency France.
“Unlike depressive episodes whose prevalence has significantly increased between 2017 and 2021 (…), the frequency of anxious states has remained stable”, summarizes this study.
Stable figures between 2017 and 2021
The covid pandemic, which resulted in 2020 in unprecedented health restrictions with strict confinements in many countries, is generally considered a factor that has aggravated many mental disorders.
A vast synthetic work, published in 2021 in The Lancet, had notably concluded that depressed and anxious disorders are worsening as part of the pandemic.
Public health researchers France therefore sought to test the hypothesis “according to which anxiety states could have increased following the health crisis”.
But the results are not convincing. At the end of the study, conducted by telephone survey with thousands of French people on the basis of a questionnaire measuring the main anxious symptoms, the figures have generally remained the same between 2017 and 2021.
Covid’s pandemic did not worsen things
The seven questions asked included, for example, the frequency that the person experiences a “feeling of fear as if something horrible was going (…) to happen”, or his ability to “stay quietly to do nothing and (feeling) relaxed”.
The results are deemed concern by researchers, with 12.5% of those questioned who have anxious symptoms. And they correspond to social inequalities: they appear more frequent in people in financial difficulty or a low level of education.
On the other hand, the pandemic of Covid did not aggravate things. This seems counter-intuitive, since at the early days of the pandemic, rapid studies had testified to a jump in the feelings of anxiety in France.
But “the strong prevalences observed at the start of the pandemic phase could be transient”, advance the researchers, contrasting this observation with the depressive episodes which often seem to have been aggravated in a lasting way.
