COVID-19 and mental health in Australia – a scoping review

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has spread to almost every country around the world and caused more than 3 million deaths. The pandemic has triggered enormous disruption in people’s daily lives with profound impacts glob- ally. This has also been the case in Australia, despite the country’s comparative low mortality and physical morbidity due to the virus. This scoping review aims to provide a broad summary of the research activity focused on mental health during the first 10 months of the pandemic in Australia. Results: A search of the Australian literature was conducted between August-November 2020 to capture published scientific papers, online reports and pre-prints, as well as gaps in research activities. The search identified 228 unique records in total. Twelve general population and 30 subpopulation group studies were included in the review. Conclusions: Few studies were able to confidently report changes in mental health driven by the COVID-19 context (at the population or sub-group level) due to a lack of pre-COVID comparative data and non-representative sam- pling. Never-the-less, in aggregate, the findings show an increase in poor mental health over the early period of 2020. Results suggest that young people, those with pre-existing mental health conditions, and the financially disadvan- taged, experienced greater declines in mental health. The need for rapid research appears to have left some groups under-researched (e.g. Culturally and Linguistically Diverse populations and Indigenous peoples were not studied), and some research methods under-employed (e.g. there was a lack of qualitative and mixed-methods studies). There is a need for further reviews as the follow-up results of longitudinal studies emerge and understandings of the impact of the pandemic are refined.