Could it have something to do with being locked up for the last 6 months or worry about ones future career maybe?
So you're saying the study is so shoddy that they didn't have a control group of people who went through the same lockdowns but didn't get COVID? Otherwise, your comment doesn't make sense.
But my comment was kinda tongue-in-cheek: How do you even find people not affected by this doom-n-gloom global news story?
No, they were studying the effects of COVID, not the effects of lockdowns. Your suggestion is controlling for the wrong variable.
What you want to control for is the lockdown effects or general disease stress, not covid-19 itself. That's what you're trying to measure.
Those aware they had Covid19 will fear all the known-unknowns around Covid19. Those who don't think they had it wouldn't have stressed about it at all.
You can't give a control group a "placebo illness" such that they don't know whether it's Covid-19 or not (and make it double-blind so that the people administering this illness also don't know).
The people who overcame Covid-19 had an experience that members of a control group who did not overcome Covid-19 do not have.
That's an obvious source of bias, which is inherent to the study.
What would be credible would be data about people who had Covid-19 but did not know it (due to mild symptoms and no hospitalization), showing that those people have mental problems compared to a control group of those who didn't have Covid-19.
However, if there is a real physiological effect there, it could be tied to the severity of the illness: i.e. how much damage it caused to the body. In that case, those secondary effects could be expected to be next to nonexistent in the mild group.
Your suggestion of another control group with Covid-19-but-no-symptoms would help answer that question too, though ideally we'd want those who had Covid19 but didn't know it at all.
But anyway, this paper is only establishing correlation: getting to causation in medicine is the harder task and takes years or decades and even then it's usually inconclusive!
Some things stick out:
1) That we are all locked up in a state of anxiety is a little bit hard to control for especially because those factors alone may not trigger things, but those factors + COVID may actually amplify.
2) The big loophole that's nary impossible to nail down is the psychological impact of being told you have something that 'might kill you and has killed 550 000 Americans and the cause of a pandemic' vs. 'You have the normal flu go hoe you'll be fine in two days'.
I once had an ailment that was actually something not so severe (lack of sleep, too much redbull and stress) and was fine a few months after adjusting, by my symptoms were so varied and odd I was sure I had the 'start of something worse'. The fact the doctors could not nail it down with a straight diagnosis sent me into kind of a panic.
The 'real control group' would be people that 'Had actual COVID' but were actually told that 'They just have the regular flu' - which would be obviously next to impossible.
Because the symptoms identified are common and indirect things like 'Depression and Anxiety' - it speaks even more to the mental aspects of the side effects.
If for example COVID patients had '50% higher likelihood of Iron deficiency' or something like that, well, it would be easier to absorb as a straight up side effect.
It might be possible to do the same kind of survey in other countries to see if the same thing holds up. It'd be interesting to see if they can normalize for things like neuroticism, and general attitudes towards the virus, deaths in the family due to COVID etc. to see if depression is more common in those who naturally tend to worry, or have more of a reason to be afraid.
I've gone to the gas station daily to get fountain drinks, I've gone to grocery stores, etc... I have NOT gone to movie theaters or crowded in-door places, but I mostly avoided those before lockdowns.
The only change is masks.
In fact my daily life is mostly the same as it was before lockdown, except I had covid last march, have severe anxiety, depression, weakness in my hands/feet and severe neuropathy, as well as a standing heart rate of 130, sitting at 90, constant shortness of breath, fatigue that's only sort of in check when I take 3-4oz of energy shots per day plus my vyvanse, and two antihistamines (loratadine/pepcid).
At night I have severe insomnia, but that could be the pain as my pain level seems to be 2x at night as it is during the day.
I'm pretty sure there's a very valid effect of covid on the brain/body/etc. If you doubt it just go to reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers
It makes total sense for you to be depressed after surviving with so many lingering side-effects: I only hope it improves for you going forward (and sooner, rather than later)!
However, we need more papers like the OP to establish how many people are in the same boat as you, and out of all the "newly" depressed people, how many are due to actual lingering health issues, and how many are due to psychological stress caused by going through the illness that's so influential on the world today.
During the lockdowns, I've messed up my back. While I originally went for physical therapy over the summer 2020, I don't feel comfortable doing that today because of COVID. The fact that I am not doing enough to "fix myself" is making me depressed. "Lockdowns" are a spectrum, and have also stopped people from potentially making changes they need to make: I don't think it's fair for you to discount it as a non-variable here.
I am sure you are wondering aloud if you'll ever be "back to normal". So am I.
But separating out all of these will help us understand COVID19 and its consequences, and help us adapt treatment to the actual causes.
This, by contrast to the shoddy Reuters article, is a good reference, with a chart that neatly summarizes the results (pay attention to the different values on the y-axes):
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-largest-date-link-cov...
The significance and quality of the study are both impossible to elucidate from the article's text.