Editorial: Psychosocial effects of isolation and fear of contagion of COVID-19 on the mental health of different population groups

RICHAUD, MARÍA CRISTINA; MUZIO, RUBÉN N.; LEMOS, VIVIANA; URQUIJO, SEBASTIÁN; CARLO, GUSTAVO

Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers Media S.A.

Año: 2022 vol. 13

The pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 has confronted us more than a health crisis, expanding the magnitude of its consequences as a human, economic, and social crisis and becoming a case of global disaster. Different conditions as the characteristics of the catastrophe and the socio-cultural context determined the impact of the catastrophe (Ozer et al., 2003; Porter and Haslam, 2005). In the current COVID-19 outbreak, several psychological problems, as well as consequences in mental health, as stress, depression, anxiety, and intolerance of uncertainty, have increasingly emerged throughout time while the disease continues to spread.Necessary precautions to moderate the spread of the disease, such as isolation, produced an increase of people anxiety and stress even if they had not been infected with COVID. At the same time, being locked up for 2 weeks or more can be affected by the pressure on finances, the danger of unemployment, uncertainty about how to collect salaries and pensions, lack of social contact, apprehension toward the unknown, and worries for the health of oneself and others. In people with psychopathology these factors can have an even greater impact. Research on responses to previous pandemics such as SARS, Ebola, and H1N1 (Brooks et al., 2020) and recently COVID-19 (Dong and Bouey, 2020) indicated that it could cause long-term problems in the general population such as depression, high irritability, anxiety, family conflict, domestic violence, use of substances and alcohol, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.Also it is important, as was mentioned earlier, to take the characteristics of each context into account when detecting the specific stressor that impact on psychological wellbeing. Indeed, different countries took particular health measures to face the pandemic based on consideration of the characteristics of the health system, political decisions, and cultural traits of the population (Barbagelata et al., 2020).So, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated dissimilar psychological, social, and health difficulties in the different population groups analyzed.This Research Topic aimed to collect evidence, through the results of different research teams in different countries, and according to the characteristics of the preventive measures taken by the health authorities of each place, about the effects of isolation and the fear of contagion by COVID-19, in different population groups: children, adolescents, the elderly, parents, healthcare workers, between others.In this Research Topic we have collected thirty one Original Research articles (meta-analysis, transversal and cross cultural studies) that presents a comprehensive review about the psychological consequences of COVID-19 in topics including: Fear of COVID, Stress and lockdown, Effect on wellbeing; Post-traumatic stress, Effects on mental health, Vaccination, Parental influence and children behavior, Effects on anxiety, depression and loneliness, Prosociality, Cyberchondria, Burnout and stress, and Personality, in the populations groups: general population, college students, patients with schizophrenia, youths, adolescents, middle school students, university students, employees, teachers, healthcare workers, and sports players, from Israel, Spain, Argentina, Ecuador, México, China, Peru, Romania, Iran, Colombia, Italy, United Kingdom, and Pakistan, among others.