ArticleJournal of psychiatric research2022
Associations of lockdown stringency and duration with Google searches for mental health terms during the COVID-19 pandemic: A nine-country study.
Article in Journal of psychiatric research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Self-rated health and mental health before and during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany: the population-based German National Cohort (NAKO) study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Effects of Screen-Based Leisure Time on 24 Subsequent Health and Wellbeing Outcomes: A Longitudinal Outcome-Wide Analysis.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2025Article
- Promises and Pitfalls of Internet Search Data in Mental Health: Critical Review.JMIR mental health · 2025Review
- Short-term changes in mental health help-seeking behaviors following exposure to multiple social stressors and a natural disaster.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Impact of COVID-19 on public social life and mental health: a statistical study of google trends data from the USA.Journal of applied statistics · 2024Article
- The influence of COVID-19 pandemic on college students' academic performance and the construction of a learning ability warning system.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Editorial: Community series in mental illness, culture, and society: dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, volume VIII.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Marginal effects of public health measures and COVID-19 disease burden in China: A large-scale modelling study.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- School closures and well-being-related topic searches on Google during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Depressive and anxiety symptoms in adults during the COVID-19 pandemic in England: A panel data analysis over 2 years.PLoS medicine · 2023Article
- The road to postpandemic recovery in the USA: a repeated cross-sectional survey of multidimensional well-being over two years.Public health · 2023Article
- Psychological Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown and Its Evolution: A Case Study Based on Internet Searching Data during the Lockdown of Wuhan 2020 and Shanghai 2022.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Google Trends for health research: Its advantages, application, methodological considerations, and limitations in psychiatric and mental health infodemiology.Frontiers in big data · 2023Review
- Editorial: Community series in mental illness, culture, and society: Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic - Volume III.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Varieties of suffering in the clinical setting: re-envisioning mental health beyond the medical model.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Does the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown affect risk attitudes?-Evidence from rural Thailand.PloS one · 2023Article
- Editorial: Community series in mental illness, culture, and society: dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, volume VI.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Editorial: Community series in mental illness, culture, and society: dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, volume VII.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Editorial: Community series in mental illness, culture, and society: Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic-Volume II.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
16 authors at 15 institutions in 12 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesWe examined the associations of lockdown stringency and duration with Google searches for four mental health concepts (i.e., "Anxiety," "Depression," "Suicide," "Mental Health") in nine countries (i.e., Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Paraguay, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsWe retrieved national-level data for each country from Google Trends and the Global Panel Database of Pandemic Policies. In our primary analysis, we used data from all countries to estimate a set of multilevel regression models examining associations of overall lockdown stringency and lockdown duration with relative search volumes for each mental health term. We repeated the models after replacing overall lockdown stringency with each of the lockdown stringency components.
resultsA negative association was found between overall lockdown stringency and "Depression." Lockdown duration and the most stringent stay-at-home requirements were negatively associated with "Anxiety." Policies that recommended or required the cancelation of public events evidenced negative associations with "Depression," whereas associations between policies that required some or all levels of schooling to close and "Depression" were positive. Policies that recommended or required workplaces to close and those that enforced quarantines on non-citizens arriving from high-risk regions or closed borders entirely were negatively associated with "Suicide."
conclusionsLockdown duration and some lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic were generally associated with significantly lower, rather than higher, Google searches for selected mental health terms. These findings could be used alongside other evidence to develop future lockdown strategies that are sensitive to mental health issues during public health crises.
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