Long Blog 3- Mental Health, Eating Disorders & The Pandemic
A recent study claiming the pandemic had no notable effect on mental health has made a few rounds in the news, prompting readers to take a look back to the earlier pandemic days. BBC news covered the story with the headline Mental-health crisis from pandemic was minimal, study suggests. Despite the finality of the headline, the article itself mentions how the study left out some very key groups in analysis,
“The review did not look at lower-income countries, or specifically focus on children, young people and those with existing problems, the groups most likely affected, experts say, and risks hiding important effects among disadvantaged groups.”
This article left quite a stir on twitter, as a swarm disagreed with the study’s findings that the pandemic had minimal impact on mental health.
The Guardian also picked up the study in a story and brought up an interesting point that although some people’s experience is in line with the study’s null findings it does not necessarily mean that others had the same experience, thus, individual differences should be in focus when approaching pandemic mental health.
With that in mind, take a moment and come up with four words to describe your mental health during the pandemic. Were they all positive words? I know myself, along with many others, would say they were not. After all, many could find themselves anxious about the danger the pandemic posed and how the rules on pandemic living often changed and were hotly debated. People were left isolated compared to their pre-pandemic lives, and a glaring factor is that the population had to grapple with a lot of death and grief. These sentiments and concerns are in line with a study conducted in 2020 asking North Americans about their mental health pandemic experiences. The study revealed feelings of worry, loneliness, depression and anxiety (Reppas-Rindlisbacher et al., 2021). Canada did do better than America when it came to mental health effects and had the same number of reported feelings of loneliness. However, I feel this hardly minimizes the large impact the pandemic did have on Canada’s mental health, as 52% were moderate to extremely worried about the pandemic, 25.6% reported being depressive, and 23.7% were anxious (Reppas-Rindlisbacher et al., 2021).
In a pandemic that brought public health into focus, one would think so would the awareness of the pandemic’s effect on mental health. Yet, as someone who lived through the pandemic themselves while in high school, I can say the most mental health tools given for dealing with the pandemic were in class breaks and advice to go on walks. Very rarely during the pandemic did conversations, real ones, around mental health take place. Even if they did, they were subsurface pleasantries, “be sure to check up on your mental health” was the new way to say goodbye at the end of a zoom meeting. If mental health in general was not meaningfully touched upon neither were harder mental health topics like eating disorders. Despite sentiments of worry over gaining pandemic weight and an increase in the popularity of regimented workout routines such as Chloe Ting, there were no conversations concerning eating disorders or EDs.
EDs can be a mental health topic shied away from due to their serious, personal, and prevalent matter, but it’s all the more reason to have these conversations, especially when body image worries were soaring in the pandemic. A study analyzing hospitalizations for pediatric anorexia nervosa during the pandemic found that such hospitalizations increased in the pandemic’s first year compared to 6 years pre-pandemic (Vyver et al., 2023). Toronto’s own SickKids hospital which was used in the study had a 63% increase in anorexia nervosa hospitalizations (Vyver et al., 2023).
Why did the pandemic stir up eating disorder concerns? One reason laid out in an online survey study of those with anorexia nervosa is that eating disorder behaviour could have been used as a way to cope with the pandemic (Schlegl et al., 2020). The pandemic’s unpredictable nature could leave feelings of having very little control over our lives and coping eating habits can appear as what one eats is something one can control. That same study also found 70% had increased feelings of needing to work out more, body image and weight concerns and increased eating. Of course, access to in-person therapy and doctor visits decreased during the pandemic (Schlegl et al., 2020).
Why does this matter now, with the pandemic life experienced in 2020–2022 behind us? The pandemic completely changed the trajectory of lives and what your mental health experienced in that state does not simply vanish. I think it’s important to remember, mental health is something we can never divorce ourselves from as it is a part of ourselves, thus, mental health strains are not wise to ignore.
