Teachers reported more depression, anxiety compared with other workers during pandemic
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Teachers showed a significantly higher prevalence of negative mental health outcomes compared with health care and office workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported in Educational Researcher.
Joseph M. Kush, PhD, assistant professor in the department of graduate psychology at James Madison University, and colleagues sought to calculate associations between the COVID-19 pandemic and professionals’ mental health.
Kush and colleagues examined three measures of mental health: depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and the feeling of isolation. The authors used data from the U.S. COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey, an online survey from Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook, which invited users to respond to questions related to physical and mental health symptoms.
Data was used from adult patients aged 18 years and older, who responded to the survey from Sept. 8, 2020, through March 28, 2021. A total of 2,775,974 respondents were included. Of those, 135,488 were teachers. Respondents were classified into one of four groups: teachers, health care workers, office professionals and “other.”
According to logistic regression results, health care workers (OR = 0.70), officer workers (OR = 0.81), and other workers (OR = 0.78) were significantly less likely to report anxiety symptoms compared with teachers.
In addition, health care workers were less likely to report depression symptoms (OR = 0.95) and feelings of isolation (OR = 0.96) when compared with teachers. However, office workers (OR = 1.20) and other workers (OR = 1.10) were significantly more likely to report symptoms of isolation.
In a subgroup analysis, teachers teaching remotely were significantly more likely to report depressive symptoms (OR = 1.12) and feelings of isolation (OR = 1.56) compared with teachers teaching in person.
“Although various guidelines have been proposed for safe and supportive learning environments as schools reopen, these reports often fail to consider the magnitude and scope of possible negative effects on mental health outcomes among teachers, nor do they propose appropriate alternative methods and interventions to address such troubles,” Kush and colleagues wrote.