Portrait of Mental Health Identified by People with the Post-Covid Syndrome

Abstract

AbstractAimsThe Post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCS) represents an epidemic within the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially serious consequences for affected individuals, the healthcare system, and society at large. Facing a new and poorly understood health condition, this study aimed to produce a patient-centered understanding of mental health symptom patterns, functional impact, and intervention priorities.MethodsA cross-sectional analysis of the first 414 participants in a longitudinal study recruited over a 5- month from September 2022 to January 2023 was carried out involving people from Quebec who self-identified as having symptoms of PCS. People were asked to name areas of their mental health affected by PCS using the structure of the Patient Generated Index (PGI), an individualized measure suited to eliciting the most frequent and most bothersome symptoms. The PGI was supplemented with a set of patient-reported outcome measures across the rubrics of the Wilson- Cleary model. The text threads from the PGI were grouped into topics using BERTopic analysis.ResultsTwenty topics were identified from 818 text threads referring to PCS mental health symptoms nominated using the PGI format. 35% of threads were identified as relating to anxiety, discussed in terms of five topics: generalized/social anxiety, fear/worry, post-traumatic stress, panic, and nervous. 29% of threads were identified as relating to low mood, represented by five topics: depression, discouragement, emotional distress, sadness, and loneliness. A cognitive domain (22% of threads) was covered by four topics referring to concentration, memory, brain fog, and mental fatigue. Topics related to frustration, anger, irritability. and mood swings (7%) were considered as one domain and there were separate topics related to motivation, insomnia, and isolation.ConclusionThis novel method of digital transformation of unstructured text data uncovered different ways in which people think about classical mental health domains. This information could be used to evaluate the extent to which existing measures cover the content identified by people with PCS or to justify the development of a new measure of the mental health impact of PCS.