Psychological resilience matters in the relationship between the decline in economic status and adults’ depression half a year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

Frontiers in Psychiatry

Psychiatry

Tianchen Zhang¹  Jun Wan²  Lin Liu³  Yue Chen³  Jun Huang⁴ 

[1] College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, United States;School of Economics and Resource Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China;School of Social Development and Public Policy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China;School of Sociology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China;

关键词: psychological resilience;    economic status;    depression;    COVID-19;    propensity score matching (PSM);   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1239437

 received in 2023-06-13, accepted in 2023-08-18,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Background/objectiveThe outbreak of COVID-19 in China since 2019 has had a significant impact on the mental health of people in Hubei Province during the three-year pandemic period. Therefore, studying the prevalence of depression among the population of Hubei Province since the pandemic is of great significance.MethodsBased on opportunity and stress theory, we collected provincial-level data from Hubei (N = 3,285) to examine the impact of declining economic status on depressive symptoms and to investigate the moderating effect of psychological resilience during the period of economic adjustment.ResultsWe used propensity score matching to estimate the treatment effect of economic status decline on depression severity and confirmed the moderating effect of psychological resilience. We found that the more that an individual’s economic status declines, the more severe that his or her depressive symptoms become. Specifically, each unit decrease in economic status is associated with an increase of approximately 0.117 units in depression level. In addition, our results indicated that psychological resilience significantly moderated the relationship between economic decline and depression (−0.184*).Conclusions and implicationsOur study confirms the role of economic status in depressive symptoms. Compared with traditional research on the relationship between economic status and mental illness, this paper expands the research regarding the two in the context of a major public health emergency. Furthermore, we suggest ways to improve people’s mental health following the pandemic.

【 授权许可】

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Copyright © 2023 Wan, Liu, Chen, Zhang and Huang.