Well, mental health for many did take a nose dive during the pandemic and it hasn’t really recovered for many.
It was still necessary from a disease control standpoint, and the USA didn't have the balls to crack down hard enough to do more than smear the waves out so our hospital systems didn't completely collapse. (E.G. New Zealand did a reasonable job of isolating properly, while China held the crack down too hard instead of crush the numbers, then loosen a little until things started to go back up and squeeze again.)
This is my take as well. I personally viewed it as a challenge and a stress test for my own mental health, and tried my best to make life easier for myself and others. I suppose I was lucky, as my life didn’t change and I didn’t stop working. As an introvert, it felt like a holiday of sorts, with less car noise and more clean air days to enjoy. I’m not going to lie, I felt like the guy in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", and made great inroads with my reading list. I think the people who faired worse were extroverts who weren’t all that comfortable with being alone, isolated, or limited by where they could go and do, and were faced with existential issues that they had never really confronted before.