Agrandissement : Illustration 1
Article source: "Covid-19: la santé mentale des étudiants plus dégradée que celle du reste de la population", Clément Boutin, BFMTV., 09/11/2021.
The mental health of a majority of all French people has deteriorated during the Covid-19 pandemic, but students have been particularly badly affected. These are the findings of a study published in the journal Scientific Reports and highlighted in a press release by Inserm (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research).
Between March 2020 and January 2021 researchers from Inserm and the University of Bordeaux gathered data from questionnaires completed by 3783 people, including both students and non-students, in order to study their levels of anxiety and depression. While the respondents from these two groups did not have the same age or social status, the numbers of women, of people with a history of mental illness and of people working or studying in the field of medicine, were very similar across the board.
“Until now, the comparison between students and non-students has rarely been made,” explained lead author Mélissa Macalli in the Inserm press release, “our study demonstrates that there are significant inequalities in terms of mental health between these two groups, and that this disparity became even more pronounced during the second lockdown. There is probably more than one single cause for the vulnerability of students, but isolation and loneliness definitely had a severe impact. Material living conditions and the practical difficulties of studying were also major factors,” she said.
Second Lockdown Even Harder
The results of the study show that, during the period, 36.6% of students reported having symptoms of depression, 27.5% said they had symptoms of anxiety and 12.7% reported having suicidal thoughts. These figures are higher than for non-students, of whom 20.1% reported symptoms of depression, 16.9% said they suffered from anxiety and 7.9% said they had suicidal thoughts.
The researchers from Inserm and the University of Bordeaux also discovered that the prevalence of mental illness among non-students remained generally stable over the period covered by the study, but that this was not the case among students.
Anxiety and depression disorders are more prevalent when students are in lockdown. The second lockdown was also harder to handle than the first: 50% said they had symptoms of depression in autumn 2020, compared with 36% in March 2020.
At the beginning of October, a CoviPrev study (monitoring changes in behaviour and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic) conducted by the French public health agency, Santé Publique France, showed that the waves of Covid-19 have had negative effects on the mental health of French people. For example, 70% of respondents reported sleep disorders during the autumn and 26% reported signs of anxiety.
Translated by Marine Brément and Léa Urban.
Editing by Sam Trainor.