During the almost two years of on-again off-again COVID lockdowns, we heard lots of concern from many different corners about the mental health effects of forcing people to stay home and keep away from friends and family.
Many research projects were undertaken to attempt to measure the scale of the impacts on mental health.
However, the speed with which research was generated meant in some cases, research quality was sacrificed, and some research found evidence of an effect on mental health, and some didn’t.
To make sense of the very mixed findings, my colleagues and I conducted a review of all of the studies on mental health conducted during the first year of the pandemic.