Coping After COVID: Dealing with Depression During a Pandemic

Even before the pandemic, depression had the ability to touch any demographic across the globe.

The debilitating condition doesn’t discriminate based on race, religion, or socioeconomic situation, costing employers billions in lost wages annually and driving up suicides and other negative outcomes.

That was before COVID-19.

Factor in a pandemic that has reduced social opportunities, while significantly increasing the collective stress of the population, the problem has only grown.

In this month’s episode of Coping After COVID: Navigating Psychiatry After a Pandemic, Steve Levine, MD, Co-Founder and Chairman of Heading Health, spoke on how clinicians can help depression patients mitigate some of the damage caused by the ongoing pandemic.

Levine explained just how damaging depression can be and what happens when a depression patient has to adjust to the different circumstances caused by the pandemic.

And while treatment helps, there is a good chance the already expansive patient pool for depression was expanded drastically because of the events since March 2020.

Levine also said it is important to treat pediatric depression patients differently than adults in terms of both symptom manifestation and how they are treated.

And children may not adjust as well as adults when school becomes remote and social activities become few and far between.