Even before Indian announced a national lockdown for COVID-19 pandemic, WHO had warned that a mental health crisis was going to cost the Indian economy more than $1 trillion by the year 2030. This forecast can only be expected to get worse because the lockdown, where everything has come to a standstill, has aggravated the situation. In fact, in March 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak in many parts of the world, prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs, antidepressants and sleeping pills went up.

According to a new study, US healthcare workers were dealing with a range of mental-health challenges arising out of the pandemic. One of these challenges is clinical depression, aggravated by the fact that the healthcare professionals had reported symptoms of depression across the country. The study was conducted by the School of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology. Shevaun Neupert, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University, who also co-authored the paper, revealed, “What we learned suggests that anyone who identifies as a healthcare professional – whether it is a physician or a support worker in a hospital – is at risk for mental-health problems that could be devastating if left untreated.”