Letters to the Editor: We must mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on mental health

The coronavirus pandemic has created a highly stressful environment over the last nine months, with the virus itself and the associated restrictions having a significant mental health impact.

I refer to the recent article in the news “Study claims 18% of Covid patients later diagnosed with mental illness”, which indicates that almost one in five people have been diagnosed with a mental illness such as anxiety, depression or insomnia within three months of testing positive for the Covid-19 virus.

Upon reading the article, I was intrigued by the observations of Paul Harrison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who said “more research was needed to establish whether a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder could be directly linked to getting coronavirus and that general factors that influence physical health were not captured in the records analysed, such as socio-economic background, smoking, or use of drugs”.