The Impact of COVID-19 on Precision Mental Health
By Susan Lowe and Theodore D. Cosco
This piece is an excerpt from the COVID-19 edition of the GRC News.
After completing the catalyst year of the Core Research Project funded by AGE-WELL (Aging Gracefully across Environments using Technology to Support Wellness, Engagement and Long Life), Dr. Theodore D Cosco and I were thrilled to hear that our three-year Precision Mental Health project had been awarded the full $474,000 and was due to commence on April 1, 2020.
During the Catalyst year, we convened a standing board of stakeholders comprised of health leaders, older adult care specialists, seniors’ centre leaders, knowledge translation experts, computer analytics specialists and others to form a transdisciplinary stakeholders’ group for the project. All appeared excited and ready to go!
Year one of three was to be devoted almost entirely to identification of older adults’ mental health priorities; however, the COVID-19 pandemic has put this on hold. This phase of the project was designed to encompass focus groups, co-creation workshops, interviews, community engagement events, and commercialization following the development of an ‘early-warning system’ to detect those older adults at risk of poor mental health and rapidly provide them with support leading to better mental health.
We had also begun to recruit members for an Older Adults Research Advisory Panel—patient partners to advise researchers at every stage of the project, from early ideas through intervention building and testing, to ensure that the research would be relevant and meaningful and the intervention feasible for the end users. Dr. Cosco had designed the project to have older adults define the precise mental health challenge that would be studied; undoubtedly COVID-19 will influence their perspectives as well.
With the arrival of the pandemic and temporary closure of the GRC, Precision Mental Health was placed on hold for the time being. Vulnerable populations of older adults in seniors’ centres were understandably alarmed—“upside down,” in the words of one of our community partners. Some centres were indefinitely closed. With residents unable to visit with friends, family or each other, our community partners began to experience the impact of social isolation in the centres. It reinforced the idea that lack of physical contact is harmful to mental health. With physical distancing, the challenge of placing helpful technology in the hands of seniors was seen as a larger obstacle by many.
As these challenges mounted, the news media began publicizing statistics demonstrating the urgent need for change in the care of older adults. Awareness of seniors’ mental health and its connection to social isolation has increased exponentially since the occurrence of the outbreak of COVID-19, as has the perceived need to improve seniors’ mental wellbeing. Due to this increased awareness, a surge of available grants has arisen—in addition to rapid-response opportunities to ‘COVID-ize’ the research framework.
Year one of three was to be devoted almost entirely to identification of older adults’ mental health priorities; however, the COVID-19 pandemic has put this on hold.
Recently we have been working on some of these COVID calls, which often have very tight turnarounds—as little as eight days in one instance. Accordingly, we needed to conceptualize, write, and recruit required co-investigators and community partners at a break-neck pace. When we checked on Precision Mental Health stakeholders and welcomed their input regarding project topics in response to COVID-19, many were extremely busy dealing with issues including computer challenges resulting from the pandemic. Other community partners shared their members’ challenges due to the pandemic. Among them was communication. For example, although video is seen as potentially a better communication tool than telephone, the additional technological barriers presented by video are acknowledged as being challenging for many older adults and perhaps ‘not worth the effort’.
Through our new grant applications, we hope to provide an evidence-based framework for how many people are experiencing poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic and the reasons for which this is happening, with the intent that these findings would inform academic and public audiences from policy-makers to knowledge-users. We plan to use the findings from additional projects and from stakeholders’ COVID experiences to our advantage when we resume Precision Mental Health.