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Your Poor Pandemic Brain
The Pandemic Changed You. It Also Changed Your Brain.
The toll a year of loneliness, stress, fear, trauma, and loss takes on the structure and function of the brain
Sandro Galea, MD, is a physician and epidemiologist who knows trauma: He has studied people’s mental health in the aftermath of, among other earth-shattering events, 9/11, hurricanes, and civil unrest. In March and April 2020, the Boston University School of Public Health dean conducted one of the first mental health surveys of Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. Galea found that in those early months, depression rates in the United States had more than tripled compared to the years prior, up from 8.5% to 27.8%.
“We were anticipating to find elevated rates, because we know that [depression increases in prevalence] from other large-scale events, but the threefold increase was surprising,” Galea says. “Typically, in general populations after these events, you’d expect about a doubling, so the threefold increase was surprising, no question.”
Anyone who’s lived through the past year could tell you that March and April were not a blip. More recent research indicates that depression rates have remained consistently elevated during the pandemic, ranging…
