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Depression rates over the past year during the Covid-19 pandemic era correspond to what experts predict should have covered a period of 20 years, according to scientific research conducted under the auspices of the Department of Medicine and the Rector’s Office of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in collaboration with the World Psychiatric Association.
As the findings revealed, depression almost tripled from 2020 to 2021 – the year when the coronavirus pandemic broke out.
The study was conducted on a very large sample of respondents from 40 countries, with about 56,000 answers and several psychometric tools.
The scientific director of the research, Professor of Psychiatry at the Department of Medicine of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Konstantinos Foundoulakis, spoke about the results of the research on public broadcaster ERT.
“Depression, normally, in the general population is of the order of 4.5%, more specifically in a percentage of 3% men and 6% in women. Last year on average in 40 countries, which sometimes had lockdowns and sometimes things were calmer or peaked in deaths, we had 12% depression. Given that usually, the average in new cases of depression is 0.3% per year, it is like having compression and early onset of depression that we would normally see in the next 10 to 20 years”, he said.
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