Bălăeţ Maria, Trender William, Lerede Annalaura, Hellyer Peter J, Hampshire Adam
Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
J Psychopharmacol. 2025 Jun 18;39(9):2698811251346729. doi: 10.1177/02698811251346729.
Mental health implications of COVID-19 drug use patterns are still unclear.
We used data-driven clustering in a large citizen science cohort recruited agnostically to an interest in drug-use to categorise people according to common patterns of drug use and analysed their mental health symptoms (GAD-7 and PHQ-9 items), from recruitment prior to COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 ( = 242,260) to three follow-ups in 2020-2022 ( = 68,416). Mixed effects modelling examined how mental health scores related to drug-use clusters cross-sectionally and how changes in those scores longitudinally related to changes in consumption frequencies.
We identified six common patterns of drug use during the COVID-19 pandemic, with cannabis cross cutting most of them. The majority of drug use clusters had worse average mental health scores relative to drug-naive individuals at all timepoints. The average mental health scores of those who used more drugs during the pandemic worsened over time relative to individual baselines. However, psychedelics and cannabis users showed average improvements in depression (β = -0.26 SD, 95% CI: -0.44, -0.08, = 0.003), anxiety (β = -0.24 SD, 95% CI: -0.41, -0.06, = 0.007) and overall mental health (β = -0.2 SD, 95% CI: -0.35, -0.04, = 0.01) from pre-pandemic to January 2022, becoming on par with the drug-naive group. This was not the case for cannabis-only users, whose worse mental health scores persisted.
Those who used psychedelics may have experienced some improvements in mental health across the pandemic timeframe, which supports the idea that beneficial effects on mood and anxiety associated with these substances may extend beyond controlled conditions.
新冠疫情期间药物使用模式对心理健康的影响仍不明确。
我们在一个大型公民科学队列中采用数据驱动聚类法，该队列招募时未考虑对药物使用的兴趣，根据常见的药物使用模式对人群进行分类，并分析他们的心理健康症状（广泛性焦虑障碍量表7项和患者健康问卷9项），从2020年新冠疫情限制措施实施前的招募阶段（n = 242,260）到2020 - 2022年的三次随访阶段（n = 68,416）。混合效应模型研究了心理健康评分与药物使用聚类的横断面关系，以及这些评分的纵向变化与消费频率变化的关系。
我们确定了新冠疫情期间六种常见的药物使用模式，大麻贯穿其中的大多数模式。在所有时间点，与未使用药物的个体相比，大多数药物使用聚类的平均心理健康评分更差。在疫情期间使用更多药物的人群，其平均心理健康评分相对于个体基线随时间恶化。然而，使用迷幻剂和大麻的人群在抑郁（β = -0.26标准差，95%置信区间：-0.44，-0.08，p = 0.003）、焦虑（β = -0.24标准差，95%置信区间：-0.41，-0.06，p = 0.007）和整体心理健康（β = -0.2标准差，95%置信区间：-0.35，-0.04，p = 0.01）方面，从疫情前到2022年1月显示出平均改善，与未使用药物的组相当。仅使用大麻的人群情况并非如此，他们较差的心理健康评分持续存在。
在整个疫情期间，使用迷幻剂的人群可能在心理健康方面有一些改善，这支持了这些物质对情绪和焦虑的有益影响可能超出受控条件的观点。
