Abstract
Objective: Italy has been largely involved by the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study aimed at evaluating the impact of the lockdown during the pandemic on mental health adopting both a longitudinal and a cross-sectional design. Accordingly, the study investigated general psychopathology a few weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak (T0) and during lockdown (T1), and the associations between lockdown-related environmental conditions, self-perceived worsening in daily living and psychopathology.
Methods: 130 subjects (aged 18-60 years) were included in the longitudinal design, and an additional subsample of 541 subjects was recruited for the in-lockdown evaluation. Socio-demographic data and the Brief Symptom Inventory were collected both at T0 and T1. Moreover, at T1 an online survey was administered for the evaluation of lockdown-related environmental conditions and self-perceived variations in daily living induced by quarantine, along with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised.
Results: Longitudinal analysis showed that phobic anxiety and depressive symptoms increased at T1 as compared with T0, whereas interpersonal sensitivity and paranoid ideation decreased. Pre-existing general psychopathology predicted COVID-19-related post-traumatic symptomatology. Cross-sectional analyses underlined that self-perceived deteriorations in various areas of daily living were associated with general and post-traumatic psychopathology, and with several lockdown-related conditions, especially economic damage.
Conclusion: The present study underlined a different trend of increased internalizing and decreased interpersonal symptoms during COVID-19 quarantine in Italy. Furthermore, the results showed that subjects with pre-existing psychopathology and those reporting economic damage during the pandemic were more likely to develop deterioration of their mental health.
Keywords: Covid-19; Depression; Lockdown; Pandemic; Post-traumatic stress disorders; Quarantine.
【저자키워드】 COVID-19, pandemic, Depression, lockdown, Post-traumatic stress disorders, Quarantine., 【초록키워드】 Stress, mental health, quarantine, COVID-19 pandemic, Variation, Symptom, Italy, sensitivity, Deterioration, COVID-19 outbreak, Impact, longitudinal, association, post-traumatic, Analysis, cross-sectional design, subject, worsening, daily living, ideation, longitudinal design, Administered, phobic anxiety, inventory, depressive symptom, predicted, collected, develop, involved, recruited, investigated, analysis, conditions, environmental condition, paranoid, 【제목키워드】 Italy, COVID-19 outbreak, observation,