“As someone who studies racial trauma, this is not surprising to me,” said Dr. Maryam Jernigan-Noesi, a licensed psychologist and the CEO of Jernigan & Associates Psychological and Educational Consulting LLC. “It really is hard to disentangle the onset of the pandemic with the heightened awareness and media coverage of race-related events around the same time.”
The researchers of this study found that the prevalence of people with depression or anxiety symptoms in the U.S. grew from roughly 11% of people in 2019 to almost 40% in that first year of COVID-19. But this increase was even steeper for Black, Hispanic, and Asian American people, according to the study, which is titled “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Mental Health and Mental Health Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
“We were interested in studies coming out showing that the pandemic had clearly impacted mental health in negative ways due to stresses and lack of resources,” said Dr. Mieke Beth Thomeer, an associate professor of sociology at UAB and the study’s co-author. “And the mental health impacts did not seem to be even in the population.”
According to their research, comparing 2019 to April and May 2020, the probabilities of experiencing depression and anxiety were 218% greater for white people, 280% greater for Black people, 344% greater for Hispanic people, and 560% greater for Asian American people. But the timing of these upticks also mattered.
“It’s useful to not think of these disparities as static but responsive to different events that are happening,” explained Thomeer. “We were surprised to see such a clear impact of the murder of George Floyd specifically on Black Americans—and the Atlanta shootings specifically on Asian Americans. That is something we need to pay attention to: temporal health impacts.”
