Patients with clinical depression “stopped seeking treatment” during the COVID waves

In the first study of its kind, German researchers showed that the COVID pandemic saw a big drop in the number of patients admitted to hospital for clinical depression. Regardless of these national statistics, the researchers found that the number of outpatients they treated increased during the same period in their department. Since hospital treatment offers more intensive levels of care, this means that many patients did not receive adequate care for their condition. It is not yet known if this change in treatment is also observed in other countries.

The researchers, from Frankfurt University Hospital, analyzed German national databases. They found that during the first wave of COVID, new hospitalizations for first-time clinical depression dropped by 57.5%, from 13,457 in January 2020 to 5,723 in April 2020. In the same period, the number of patients hospitalized for recurrent depression was reduced by 56.3%. , from 22188 to 9698.

Lead researcher Dr. Mareike Aichholzer said: “WWe also saw a decline in inpatient treatment of recurrent depression in our own hospital in Frankfurt. In addition to stricter admission rules, this seemed to be due to a drop in demand from patients themselves.”.

In contrast, the number of new outpatients treated for clinical depression at Frankfurt University Hospital remained stable, and the number of patients with recurrent depression showed a significant increase between 2019 and 2021. However, Dr. Aichholzer notes “This is data from a single center, so we have to wait and see what other centers say.”.

She continued, “The results indicate that patients who suffered from depression repeatedly during their lifetime were less likely to be admitted to hospital during the pandemic. However, these patients are often so severely affected by depression that outpatient treatment alone is not sufficient to achieve satisfactory symptom improvement. The result is that patients lose their quality of life in the long term. The actual reason for this observation is unclear. Although our study was not designed to identify the reasons for these changes, however, we suspect that clinically depressed patients in particular are more often withdrawn from society/friends/family and that this behavior was more common during times of confinement and strict hygiene regulations. Furthermore, we suspect that clinically depressed patients avoided the hospital because they were afraid of being infected with COVID-19 on the ward.

Data from our hospital in Frankfurt indicate that clinically depressed patients seem to have withdrawn, rather than seek appropriate mental health help. To be prepared for winter with potentially rising COVID numbers, we need to provide easily accessible help and raise awareness of this issue.”

Clinical depression, also known as major depressive disorder (MDD), is a serious mental illness that affects more than 6% of Europeans at any one time. Most patients can be treated with drugs and/or counseling, although a minority of patients do not respond to treatment.

Commenting, Professor Brenda Penninx, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Department of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Amsterdam, said:

“The figures found by the Frankfurt team confirm a familiar pattern. We recently found that quite a few countries are beginning to report a declining pattern in the use of mental health care during the early years of the pandemic. It is extremely important that in the years to come we follow up on whether delayed treatments may result in an increase in mental health problems. This also illustrates that mental health care deserves proper clinical care during future pandemics.”

This is an independent comment, Professor Penninx was not involved in this research.

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Poster P.0127 Impact of covid-19 on the number of German treatments of patients with depression: a gap in care for the mentally ill? (researchers M. AichholzerC. Schiweck, C.Uckermark, T.Hamzehloiya, C.Reif-Leonhard, A. Reif and S. Edwin Thanarajah) will appear at the 35^the Annual Conference of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, taking place in Vienna and online from October 15-18, see https://www.ecnp.eu/Congress2022/ECNPcongress. Up to 5,000 delegates are expected to attend. The ECNP is the main European organization working in applied neuroscience.