Citation

Lee SY, Ro YS, Jeong J, Shin SD, Moon S. J. Clin. Med. 2022; 11(3).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/jcm11030488

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had wide-ranging effects on the mental health of the public. This study aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the characteristics of psychiatric patients who visited emergency departments (ED) during this time. A cross-sectional study was conducted including patients visiting 402 nationwide EDs from 27 January 2020 to 29 June 2020 (22 weeks; during-COVID) and the corresponding period in 2019 (28 January 2019 to 30 June 2019, 22 weeks; before-COVID) to control for seasonal influ-ences. Among the 6,210,613 patients who visited the ED, 88,520 (2.5%) patients who visited before the pandemic and 73,281 (2.7%) patients who visited during the pandemic had some kind of psychiatric illness. The incidence rates of psychiatric self-harm increased from 0.54 before the pandemic to 0.56 during the pandemic per 1,000,000 person-days (p = 0.04). Age-and sex-standardized rates of psychiatric illnesses per 100,000 ED visits increased during the pandemic (rate differences (95% CIs); 45.7 (20.1-71.4) for all psychiatric disorders and 42.2 (36.2-48.3) for psychiatric self-harm). The incidence of psychiatric self-harm and the proportion of psychiatric patients visiting EDs increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Language: en

Keywords

adolescent; adult; human; COVID-19; suicide; Suicide; child; female; male; aged; incidence; Mental health; pandemic; Korea; mood disorder; major clinical study; mental disease; controlled study; seasonal variation; sex ratio; automutilation; age distribution; emergency ward; mental patient; cross-sectional study; Emergency; Article; coronavirus disease 2019