My Take | Mental illness from Covid on the rise? Relax, not really
- Almost all such surveys are substandard scientifically, according to one US expert and the Journal of Psychosomatic Research
It turns out there may be fewer than first thought. Those who did the surveys and the news reports about them are both being unnecessarily alarmist, if an eminent US psychiatrist is right.
Michael Scheeringa, professor and vice-chair of research for psychiatry at Tulane University School of Medicine, in New Orleans, has reviewed 34 such studies from 11 places, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland.
Writing in Psychology Today, he finds almost all the studies substandard academically and scientifically, and that some journals have relaxed editorial standards to put them on the fast track for publication. “When I look at these studies, there are obvious problems,” he wrote. “More are being published every week. I gave up trying to read them all, but it probably doesn’t matter, because nearly all of them used the same methods. They just keep repeating the same type of research in different countries.”
He identifies six common problems, five of which plagued all but one of the studies, or so he claims.
All the studies he reviewed were based on self-administered questionnaires rather than interviews by trained researchers. This means individuals could misunderstand or misinterpret the questions, and give the answers they thought researchers wanted rather than stating their actual conditions.