How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect mental health?

Now that some years have passed since the pandemic's height, we can learn more from synthesising all the evidence about its shorter and longer term effects.

In this episode, Ethelreda Nakimuli and Peter Jones talk about two new papers that gather the past 5 years of work on the pandemic and mental health and policy approaches. They talk about the different effects of the pandemic on different groups' mental health, how mental health care was affected, and about what we can learn for future crises about different types of public health response to the pandemic.

Click here to read the full articles:

• https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(25)00247-0 /fulltext
• https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(25)00358-X/fulltext

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Body dissatisfaction has been rising among adolescents in recent years, and so have symptoms and diagnoses of mental disorders. To help us know what to do about increasing youth mental ill health, we need better understandings of what is driving it, but causal factors are hard to pin down.

In this episode, Ilaria Costantini and Francesca Solmi talk about their new study that uses a longitudinal twin study to disentangle the genetic and environmental factors in the associations between adolescent body dissatisfaction and later symptoms of eating disorder and depression. We think about why body dissatisfaction is such a key factor and talk about ways it could be tackled.

Click here to read the full article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(25)00333-5/fulltext?dgcid=tlcom_podcast_acq-december25_lanpsy

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Weight gain is a typical side-effect of taking antipsychotics and can have a big impact on people. But for young people with bipolar disorder, metformin isn't commonly prescribed alongside an antipsychotic. In this episode, Melissa DelBello describes a huge randomised trial in the USA on metformin for young people with bipolar disorder taking antipsychotics, looking at its effects over a 2-year period.

Click here to read the full article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(25)00273-1/fulltext

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