COVID-19 impact on informal caregivers' mental health: Study

A new study led by Simon Fraser University’s Gerontology Research Centre has found that female informal caregivers who provide intensive care at home experienced higher levels of depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic, and suggests more support is needed.

The study, among the first to examine the mental health of informal caregivers over time, was recently published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B.

Researchers surveyed 14,118 caregivers drawn from the full Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging COVID-19 study conducted over the first year of the pandemic, from April to December 2020. The CLSA is a national study that includes both pre-pandemic and peri-pandemic data on participants, which provided a window for researchers to compare their responses during the pandemic with data collected from previous surveys carried out between 2011 and 2018 on the same individuals...read more on SFU News.