Kumar Rahul, Mukherjee Shubhadeep, Choi Tsan-Ming, Dhamotharan Lalitha
Information Systems, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Sambalpur, Odisha, India.
Operations Management and Decision Sciences, Xavier Institute of Management, XIM University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
Decis Support Syst. 2022 Nov;162:113792. doi: 10.1016/j.dss.2022.113792. Epub 2022 May 6.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on mankind, causing physical suffering and deaths across the globe. Even those who have not contracted the virus have experienced its far-reaching impacts, particularly on their mental health. The increased incidences of psychological problems, anxiety associated with the infection, social restrictions, economic downturn, etc., are likely to aggravate with the virus spread and leave a longer impact on humankind. These reasons in aggregation have raised concerns on mental health and created a need to identify novel precursors of depression and suicidal tendencies during COVID-19. Identifying factors affecting mental health and causing suicidal ideation is of paramount importance for timely intervention and suicide prevention. This study, thus, bridges this gap by utilizing computational intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to unveil the factors underlying mental health issues. We observed that the pandemic and subsequent lockdown anxiety emerged as significant factors leading to poor mental health outcomes after the onset of COVID-19. Consistent with previous works, we found that psychological disorders have remained pre-eminent. Interestingly, financial burden was found to cause suicidal ideation before the pandemic, while it led to higher odds of depressive (non-suicidal) thoughts for individuals who lost their jobs. This study offers significant implications for health policy makers, governments, psychiatric practitioners, and psychologists.
新冠疫情对人类造成了严重影响，在全球范围内导致身体痛苦和死亡。即使那些未感染病毒的人也经历了其深远影响，尤其是对他们心理健康的影响。心理问题发生率增加、与感染相关的焦虑、社会限制、经济衰退等，可能会随着病毒传播而加剧，并对人类产生更长期的影响。这些因素综合起来引发了对心理健康的担忧，并产生了识别新冠疫情期间抑郁症和自杀倾向新先兆的需求。识别影响心理健康并导致自杀意念的因素对于及时干预和预防自杀至关重要。因此，本研究通过利用计算智能和自然语言处理（NLP）来揭示心理健康问题背后的因素，填补了这一空白。我们观察到，疫情及随后的封锁焦虑成为新冠疫情爆发后导致心理健康状况不佳的重要因素。与先前的研究一致，我们发现心理障碍仍然最为突出。有趣的是，经济负担在疫情之前被发现会导致自杀意念，而对于失业者来说，它会导致出现抑郁（非自杀性）想法的几率更高。本研究对卫生政策制定者、政府、精神科医生和心理学家具有重要意义。
