Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Covid-19 Pandemic On Sanitation Practices And Anxiety In The General Population, Leah Cliatt, Joanna Petrides

Rowan-Virtua Research Day

Background: Illness anxiety and fear of contracting coronavirus increased considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic. The media, being in lockdown, and cyberchondria had the largest impact on the population’s anxiety surrounding illness. While this kind of reaction to illness is expected during the pandemic, there is limited data on post-pandemic illness anxiety levels in the general population. Patients’ perception of disease impacts medicine at every level; medical professionals need to understand the concerns and fears of their patients in order to treat the post-pandemic patient. We hypothesized that sanitation practices and anxiety surrounding illness have not returned to baseline pre-COVID-19 …

Changes In Real-World Dispensing Of Adhd Stimulants In Youth From 2019 To 2021 In California, Anika Patel, Rishikesh Chavan, Cyril Rakovski, Richard C. Beuttler, Sun Yang

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Introduction: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common pediatric neurobehavioral disorders in the U.S. Stimulants, classified as controlled substances, are commonly used for ADHD management. We conducted an analysis of real-world stimulants dispensing data to evaluate the pandemic’s impact on young patients (≤ 26 years) in California.

Methods: Annual prevalence of patients on stimulants per capita across various California counties from 2019 and 2021 were analyzed and further compared across different years, sexes, and age groups. New patients initiating simulants therapy were also examined. A case study was conducted to determine the impact of socioeconomic status on patient …

Modality And Terminology Changes For Behavioral Health Service Delivery During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review, Kimberly S. Elliot, Eman H. Nabulsi, Nicholas Sims-Rhodes, Vandy C. Dubre, Emily Barena, Nelly Yuen, Michael Morris, Sarah Sass, Bridget Kennedy, Karan P. Singh

Healthcare Policy, Economics and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted healthcare professionals to implement service delivery adaptations to remain in compliance with safety regulations. Though many adaptations in service delivery were reported throughout the literature, a wide variety of terminology and definitions were used. Methods: To address this, we conducted a PRISMA review to identify service delivery adaptations across behavioral healthcare services in the United States from March 2020 to May 2022 and to identify variations in terminology used to describe these adaptations. We identified 445 initial articles for our review across eight databases using predetermined keywords. Using a two-round screening process, authors used a …

Prevalence Of Depression, Anxiety And Stress After The Covid-19 Pandemic Period Among Students At The Medical University Of Sofia; Significance Of Demographic, Educational, And Pandemic-Related Variables, Nadya Avramova

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences

This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress among undergraduate dental students at Sofia Medical University and to investigate its associations with some demographic, educational and pandemic-related variables. A self-reported questionnaire that included the validated DASS-21 scale was administered to a group of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th year students (n=70, response rate 95.7%). Results indicated abnormal levels of depression, anxiety, and stress in 34.3%, 65.7% and 59.7% of the participants, respectively. A much larger proportion of females suffered from abnormal levels of anxiety (56.6%) as compared with males (9%), p=.003. Single students exhibited significantly …

Rural Mental Health Care During A Global Health Pandemic: Addressing And Supporting The Rapid Transition To Tele-Mental Health, Shawnda Schroeder, Holly Roberts, Thomasine Heitkamp, Brandy Clarke, Heather J. Gotham, Erika Franta

Indigenous Health Faculty Publications

The adoption of tele-mental health by mental health professionals has been slow, especially in rural areas. Prior to 2020, less than half of mental health agencies offered tele-mental health for patients. In response to the global health pandemic in March of 2020, mental health therapists across the U.S. were challenged to make the rapid shift to tele-mental health to provide patient care. Given the lack of adoption of tele-mental health previously, immediate training in tele-mental health was needed. This article describes collaborative efforts between two mental health technology transfer centers and one addiction technology transfer center in rural regions of …

Comparing Levels Of Situational Empathy Based On Medium Of Exposure To Covid-19 Mortality Information And Proximity To Others, Beth Durkin

Honors Projects

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people expressed a lax attitude to the policies put in place to keep the public safe despite the high risk of infection and its devastating effects on health across the United States. It is possible that this response may be partially due to a “numbness to numbers,” a phenomenon that describes diminished empathy for a large group of people experiencing a negative event (eg. COVID-19). The present study explored the relationship between levels of situational empathy and the medium of exposure to COVID-19 mortality information (eg. personal story or fact sheet) in an …

The Course Of Covid: How Has The Pandemic Changed The Ways Therapists Use Art In Their Therapeutic Practice?, Deborah Sharpe

Art Therapy | Doctoral Dissertations

In 2020, the global pandemic fundamentally changed our everyday lives personally and professionally. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the art therapy profession: the challenges of shifting to telehealth, managing work/life balance, confronting new realities around notions of privacy and confidentiality, and adapting the materials used in sessions. The necessary innovations and adjustments also revealed the unexpected benefits the pandemic and online therapy platforms provided. The researcher was interested in exploring the challenges and benefits of telehealth, the changes to the practical and essential qualities of the art therapy session, the therapeutic relationship, …

A Case Study Addressing Trauma Needs During Covid-19 Remote Learning From An Ecological Systems Theory Framework, Sharmeen Mahmud

All Faculty Open Access Publications

Mental health conditions related to trauma among American children are a concern, particularly because of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Children, as students, carry the trauma they encounter with them into the classroom. Students impacted by trauma learn differently due to effects on the brain that relate to several impairments, causing them to perform poorly in school. However, teachers may not always understand this issue. This case study shows how certain dynamics within the EST layers impacted one school during the pandemic. The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers at the school experienced a trauma-informed online …

Parent And Child Anxiety Evaluated During An Early Period Of The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Mixed-Methods Study, Karla M. Abela, Darlene Acorda, Stanley Cron, Geri Lobiondo-Wood

Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews

Purpose: The objective of this study was to explore parent and child anxiety during the pandemic. Unlike previous pandemics, measures implemented to prevent the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been much more limiting.

Methods: An explanatory convergent mixed-methods design was used to describe anxiety of children 9–17 years of age and their parents during August–October 2020. Adult and child versions of State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) were used to examine levels as measured on STAI’s state-anxiety subscale. Web-based interviews with a subset of patients were conducted qualitatively to analyze anxiety-related themes.

Results: A total of 188 parents …

Suicide Numbers During The First 9-15 Months Of The Covid-19 Pandemic Compared With Pre-Existing Trends: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis In 33 Countries, Jane Pirkis, David Gunnell, Sangsoo Shin, Marcos Del Pozo-Banos, Vikas Arya, Pablo Analuisa Aguilar, Louis Appleby, S. M. Yasir Arafat, Ella Arensman, Murad Khan

Department of Psychiatry

Background: Predicted increases in suicide were not generally observed in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the picture may be changing and patterns might vary across demographic groups. We aimed to provide a timely, granular picture of the pandemic's impact on suicides globally.
Methods: We identified suicide data from official public-sector sources for countries/areas-within-countries, searching websites and academic literature and contacting data custodians and authors as necessary. We sent our first data request on 22nd June 2021 and stopped collecting data on 31st October 2021. We used interrupted time series (ITS) analyses to model the association between the …

Change In Students’ Peer Evaluations Of Requirements Elicitation Interviews Across The Pre-Pandemic And Pandemic-Affected Semesters, Dmytro Babik, Iryna Babik

Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Successful development of an information system to solve a business problem depends on the analyst’s ability to elicit system requirements from a user. This complex competency could be trained via critical peer evaluation of the requirements elicitation (RE) interviews. In this study, 294 students across four pre-pandemic and two COVID-19 pandemic-affected semesters evaluated recorded sample RE interviews of low and high quality. A piecewise regression modeling was used to examine the change in students’ evaluations separately for the pre-pandemic and pandemic-affected semesters. Current results showed that students exhibited inflated evaluation scores (relative to instructors’ scores) for the high-quality, but not …

Social Isolation During The Covid-19 Pandemic And Its Impact On Maine's Nursing Homes, Tanya Roy

Honors College

The COVID-19 pandemic has created several challenges within the healthcare industry and has highlighted the impact of social isolation on older adults in Maine’s nursing homes. The older adult population, defined as individuals 65 years and older, has been identified with increased risk in contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, older adults were placed on strict isolation precautions and confined within their nursing home setting, many residing only in their rooms. With Maine having the oldest population in the United States, this created a need for further investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the lived …

Understanding The Mental And Emotional Impacts Of Being A Caregiver Of Socially Isolated Residents During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Chloe Kerrick

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The mental health and emotional wellbeing of individuals has declined in many ways over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some groups have seen more drastic changes in their mental health and emotional wellbeing, especially those working in healthcare. While nearly all healthcare facility workers have experienced an increased burden brought about by the pandemic, long-term care facility workers have been tasked with caring for clients that, for periods of time, experienced complete social isolation. This project will attempt to answer the question of how caring for a group of socially isolated residents over an extended period has affected the …

Virtual Versus Face-To-Face Cognitive Behavioral Treatment Of Depression: Meta-Analytic Test Of A Noninferiority Hypothesis And Men’S Mental Health Inequities, Carly M. Charron, Kevin M. Gorey

Social Work Publications

Global rates of depression have increased significantly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear how the recent shift of many mental health services to virtual platforms has impacted service users, especially for the male population which are significantly more likely to complete suicide than women. This paper presents the findings of a rapid meta-analytic research synthesis of 17 randomized controlled trials on the relative efficacy of virtual versus traditional face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in mitigating symptoms of depression. Participants’ aggregated depression scores were compared upon completion of the therapy (posttest) and longest follow-up measurement. The results …

The Relationship Between Social Media Use And Depression And Anxiety Symptoms During Covid-19, Tene'sha L. Crews, Christina Sheerin

Undergraduate Research Posters

The rise of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global surge in exposure to disaster and crisis-related media. Increases in poor mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression, are associated with increased exposure to such media content (Abbas et al., 2021; Riehm et al., 2020; Zhao & Zhou, 2020). In recent years, social media has become one of the most widely used sources for news; approximately 48% of adult Americans receive their news from social media (Pew Research Center, 2021). During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in social media use due to social distancing and …

Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Child Anxiety Symptoms: The Influence Of The Caregiver-Child Relationship, Rebecca Hoppe

Theses and Dissertations

Research suggests that youth are dealing with a myriad of worries during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ellis et al., 2020), which highlights the need for investigations focused on child anxiety. However, to date little research has examined children’s anxiety in the COVID-19 pandemic nor the potential protective effects of the caregiver-child relationship. Therefore, this research aimed to contribute to the literature by investigating the influence of COVID-19 related stressors in younger children and leveraging children’s report of their own attachment security within their relationship with their caregiver and mental health. The current study used a national, quantitative survey of young children …

Auto- Ethnography With A Deep Dive Into Changes Mental Health During The Pandemic And A Look Into The Way The Pandemic Has Shaped Nursing Protocols For Recent Nursing College Graduates, Audrey Shaffer, Sarah Bereznay

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this project we completed a deep dive into how the Covid-19 pandemic reshaped our mental health and has affected our preparation for careers as registered nurses through a series of auto- ethnographic narrative journals using scholarly articles to support this idea. By utilizing personal narratives, we analyzed and reflected upon the cognitive and mental changes we experienced throughout this pandemic. We fulfilled this by comprising two personal narratives with inquiries pertaining to each shared narrative by utilizing the common themes of being nursing students and living through a pandemic. Within these personal narratives, we discussed how the pandemic influenced …

The Acute And Persisting Impact Of Covid-19 On Trajectories Of Adolescent Depression: Sex Differences And Social Connectedness, Sabrina R. Liu, Elyssia Poggi Davis, Anton M. Palma, Curt A. Sandman, Laura M. Glynn

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Background

The COVID-19 era is a time of unprecedented stress, and there is widespread concern regarding its short- and long-term mental health impact. Adolescence is a sensitive period for the emergence of latent psychopathology vulnerabilities, often activated by environmental stressors. The present study examined COVID-19′s impact on adolescent depression and possible influences of different domains of social connectedness (loneliness, social media use, social video game time, degree of social activity participation).

Methods

A community sample of 175 adolescents (51% boys, mean age = 16.01 years) completed questionnaires once before and twice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Piecewise growth modeling examined the …

Correlates Of Covid-19 Pandemic On Anxiety Among Adults In Appalachia, Usa, Ram Lakhan, Louisa Summers, David Tataw, Peter Hackbert, Manoj Sharma

Social & Behavioral Health Faculty Publications

Background: Anxiety problems have increased in the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. However, very little is known about the anxiety rates in the new normal phase of the disease when adults have been assumed to be adjusted. The study aimed to find out the difference in anxiety in a convenience sample of Appalachian adults during the new normal phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, examine its association with sociodemographic factors, and compare it with the anxiety levels before the pandemic as recalled by the participants. Study design: A cross-sectional study. Methods: The Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale was used in the present study. The …

How Does A Medical Team In The Oncology Department React To The Covid-19 Pandemic?, Secil Omer, Andreea Maria Smarandache, Ioana Omer, Anda-Natalia Ciuhu, Roxana-Andreea Rahnea-Nita, Valentin-Titus Grigorean, Liliana Florina Andronache, Alexandru-Rares Stoian

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences

The Covid-19 pandemic was and still is a great challenge for the entire world population. People in the first line, among them doctors being a very important category, faced the risk of disease and, in some cases, even became infected. The emotional consequences of this risk are highlighted in this paperwork which tries to stress, with the help of applied questionnaires, the presence of psycho-emotional disorders among the medical staff of the Oncology Department of St. Luke's Hospital, Bucharest, during the pandemic.

The medical staff had a low level of stress, adapting to the evolution of the pandemic "to some …

The Disproportionate Impact Of Covid-19 On Women, Ava Stallone

Honors Scholar Theses

The impact of COVID-19 is placing a large strain on women. This can be seen through reports of mental health and financial concerns. Women are more vulnerable to COVID-19 related economic effects due to existing gender inequalities, which in turn may also have a negative effect on mental health. Through this study gender disproportion is looked at between mental health and COVID-19 financial concerns among women and men. The aim is to asses how COVID-19 financial concerns may be contributing to stress, anxiety, and depression. It is hypothesized that; women will report worse mental health and greater economic concerns than …

Storytelling As An Expressive Arts Therapy Intervention With Children Via Telehealth, Sidney Marie Joines

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

As an expressive arts therapist in training working in the midst of a global pandemic, I sought to develop a creative, safe, accessible, and effective intervention for children via telehealth during a time of great uncertainty. Coronavirus 2019 has had a massive impact on mental and physical health and disrupted the lives of billions across the globe; the pandemic also forced mental health professionals to online formats. I found a significant lack of literature around expressive arts therapy via telehealth. Through considering theoretical approaches from cinematherapy, narrative therapy, metaphor therapy, play therapy, and expressive arts therapy, I developed an eight-week …

Mental Health Affects Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Mia Kepler

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Over the past year worldwide everyone has experienced the Covid-19 pandemic in one way or another. As time evolves during the pandemic mental health is getting worse every day. People are experiencing feelings of loneliness and uneasiness. Mental health professionals are trying to find solutions to this major issue in today's society. Change is needed to prevent people's mental health from worsening during these unprecedented times and to help the people who are already suffering.

Mental Health Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Parents In High-Risk, Low Income Communities, Dana Alonzo, Marciana Popescu, Pinar Zubaroglu Ioannides

Covid-19 Digital Research

COVID-19 has spread across the globe, resulting in significant changes in virtually every aspect of life. Mitigation efforts, like shelter-in-place orders, have taken a particular toll on parents who have had to navigate disruptions in work and/or school schedules. Research from high-income countries demonstrates increased parental anxiety, stress, depression, and burnout resulting from the pandemic. It is unclear if these outcomes are the same for parents in high-risk communities in low-income countries where pre-pandemic conditions were deleterious. This study addresses this gap and examines the mental health impact of the pandemic on parents in high-risk communities in Guatemala.

A Predictable Home Environment May Protect Child Mental Health During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Laura M. Glynn, Elyssia Poggi Davis, Joan L. Luby, Tallie Z. Baram, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Objective

Information about the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent and adult mental health is growing, yet the impacts on preschool children are only emerging. Importantly, environmental factors that augment or protect from the multidimensional and stressful influences of the pandemic on emotional development of young children are poorly understood.

Methods

Depressive symptoms in 169 preschool children (mean age 4.1 years) were assessed with the Preschool Feelings Checklist during a state-wide stay-at-home order in Southern California. Mothers (46% Latinx) also reported on externalizing behaviors with the Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire. To assess the role of environmental factors in …

Stress, Coping, Resilience, And Sleep During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Representative Survey Study Of Us Adults, Andrew T. Gargiulo, Laurel M. Peterson, Laura A. Grafe

Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health emergency resulting in widespread death and substantial disruption to daily life. Previous research has shown that novel disease outbreaks are associated with high stress levels and sleep impairments that lead to neuropsychiatric consequences. Therefore, it is vital to study both stress and protective factors such as coping and resilience that may hinder or help sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, as gender disparities exist in sleep quality, it is important to understand the relationship between pandemic-related stress, coping strategies, resilience, and sleep in bothgenders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Our study …