Does Covid-19 affect our Mental Health?

MS Teams: https://bit.ly/3jVdyu4

Summary

No aspect of our bodies or our lives is immune to the coronavirus pandemic. This is certainly the case for mental health, with some experts issuing dire warnings about an impending psychological “tsunami”, whether through having mental health problems or our extraordinary attempts to contain them. 

In this systematic review, led by PhD student Dr Jonathan Rogers, of 72 published studies involving more than 3,500 patients found that a quarter of people hospitalised for coronavirus infections including Covid-19 have some kind of confusion or delirium. This is most likely due to reduced oxygen reaching the brain, or the effects of fever but could – in a few cases – reflect a more direct attack on the central nervous system. Neurologists are seeing rare cases of encephalitis, most likely immune mediated. 

(Full article available in the Guardian)

About the speakers:

Dr Jonathan Rogers studied Medicine at Cambridge before completing Core Psychiatry Training at the Maudsley Hospital, London. He is currently a Specialty Registrar in General Adult and Old Age Psychiatry and holds MRCP(UK) and MRCPsych. He is currently undertaking a Wellcome Trust Clinical PhD Fellowship at UCL examining the neuroimmunology and neuroimaging of catatonia.

Professor Anthony David Graduated from Medicine in 1980 from Glasgow University and is currently Director and Sackler Chair at the UCL Institute of Mental Health. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Academy of Medical Sciences; a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and a founder member of both the British Neuropsychological Society and British Neuropsychiatry Association.

He has a wide and diverse range of research interests including schizophrenia, neuropsychiatry, medically unexplained syndromes and neuroimaging – both structural and functional. He is especially interested in the concept of insight in schizophrenia and how this relates to treatment compliance and decision making capacity.