Assignment 16-Kovaleva

Annotated Bibliography: Mental Health Needs Relating to COVID-19 

Ju, Yumeng, et al. “China’s Mental Health Support in Response to COVID-19: Progression, Challenges and Reflection.” Globalization and Health, vol. 16, no. 1, 22 Oct. 2020, doi:10.1186/s12992-020-00634-8. 

This article investigates the mental health support system that China launched to help deal with the stress that comes from COVID-19 and afterwards. The strategies used in China to help the people with their mental health was information dissemination providing the people with reliable data on the number of people infected or dead and mental health education websites, public education with books published on mental health, and hotlines and quizzes made to identify and help people struggling with their mental health. These strategies were tested for their acceptability and accessibility. The main point of this paper was COVID-19 will affect and is affecting the mental health of many, so better mental health systems need to be put in place.  This source is definitely useful since it gives an example of a mental health system that has been put in place to help the increased need of mental health services in COVID-19 and thoroughly evaluates how effective this system was, pointing out its faults and strengths. This could be used in my speech as part of what I think would be good improvements to the mental health care systems and reasons why America needs to make a better mental health care system like China tried to do.  This source is different from the other ones since it is focused on China but it could still be used to apply to the U.S. This source is credible because the authors of this article are credible, most of the authors actually work in the Department of Psychiatry in different universities in Hunan, China. They are specialized in the psychiatry field and have lots of publications about mental health topics. The journal where this is published, Globalization and Health, is one of the top global health journals in the world and trusted for its high quality peer reviewed papers. This source is not biased since it is based entirely on scientific research.

Kluge, Hans Henri P. “Statement to the Press by Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, 26-03-2020.” Mental Health and Psychological Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic, 27 Mar. 2020, www.euro.who.int/en/about-us/regional-director/news/news/2020/03/mental-health-and-psychological-resilience-during-the-covid-19-pandemic. 

Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge who is the WHO Regional Director for Europe, in this statement, talks about how COVID-19 is affecting everyone physically and emotionally because of the big disruptions to our daily lives like social distancing and not being able to do many of the things people love to do. He talks about how WHO takes mental health care very seriously and suggests that we should all check on each other during these stressful times and that  individuals, communities, and governments should be addressing the public mental health. His main idea is that the government should provide reliable information, psychological support, continue care, and protect the human rights of everyone. Also that everyone should stay strong physically and mentally during this pandemic.  Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge is credible since he is a medical doctor with a degree in Public Health and the leader of the reliable World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe. This source may not be as reliable as my other ones however, because Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge is not an expert on mental health or psychiatry like the authors of most of the other articles I used in my annotated bibliography. This source was helpful to me since it shows how the mental health effects of COVID-19 are very serious and recognized by globally known leaders. It hasn’t changed my beliefs because I already knew how serious the mental health effects due to COVID-19 were. 

Magoon, Christopher, et al. “Preparing for the Mental Health Repercussions of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Psychiatric Times, 16 Sept. 2020, www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/preparing-mental-health-repercussions-covid19-pandemic. 

This article is talking about how COVID-19 and all of the different factors that come with it like normal social life disruption and economic insecurity are causing an increased need for mental health treatment. However, despite this greater need for mental health treatment, government funding is being taken out of existing mental health care funding. The mental health system has already been struggling in the United States with high rates of suicide and drug overdose. So, the main argument of this article is that mental health problems because of COVID-19 are going to put pressure causing thousands of deaths unless we change the mental health system already in place by taking action to increase the number of inpatient psychiatric beds, reimbursing health systems to emphasize mental health treatment, etc. This source is useful because it tackles the problem I am going to be writing about, how COVID-19 is affecting the mental health of people and what we can do to make the mental health system better equipped for this increased need of treatment. This article is published by the Psychiatric Times,  which may not be as credible as some of the other sources I wrote from since they are not as well-known. But the Psychiatric Times is reviewed by an editorial board with many doctors who specialize in psychiatry and is distributed to thousands of psychiatrists which leads me to believe that this source is reliable and credible. This source is not biased because it publishes on a reputable and non-biased website with its articles being peer-reviewed. This source gives me more information on possible ways to make the mental health system better for the increased need of mental health treatment during and after COVID-19. Also I didn’t know that government funding is right now being taken out of existing mental health funding in many states which I could use in my speech to show that dire action needs to be taken to stop this and instead help the mental health system in place. 

Maulik, Pallab K., et al. “Roadmap to Strengthen Global Mental Health Systems to Tackle the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” International Journal of Mental Health Systems, vol. 14, no. 1, 29 July 2020, doi:10.1186/s13033-020-00393-4. 

This article talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic is not only affecting the physical health of people, but the mental health of people too, hurting an already struggling mental health care system. This article makes recommendations for policy makers on a low, medium, and high resource capability scale and recommendations for researchers and research funders. Ways mentioned in the article to improve the mental health system after or during COVID are to have people centered care, maintaining physical distance while continuing care, training and monitoring of healthcare professionals, utilizing technology to help, and much more. The main point is creating this guide to help different people and organizations know the ways that they can help improve mental health care in relation to COVID-19. The information from this article is reliable since it is based on factual scientific research and observations. The first author of this article, Pallab K. Maulik trained as a psychiatrist at All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi and has worked as a psychiatrist in India and Australia, with many publications in his main field of mental health. While the second one, Graham Thornicroft, is Professor of Community Psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health in King’s College London.  The third author is Shekhar Saxena, professor of the Practice of Global Mental Health at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. All of these authors are specialists on the topic of mental health and at the top of their field making this article very credible and reliable. This article can be useful to my speech because it would show the suggestions of the top experts in the topic of mental health on how to strengthen the existing mental health care system and how to help provide for the increased need due to COVID-19. This article would help strengthen the credibility of the speech if I talk about their research. It gives me more ideas on what to put as what I think would be the optimal way to handle the increased mental health care needs during and after COVID-19. 

Moreno, Carmen, et al. “How Mental Health Care Should Change as a Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The Lancet Psychiatry, vol. 7, no. 9, 1 Sept. 2020, pp. 813–824., doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(20)30307-2. 

This piece from the Lancet addresses the increased risk of mental health problems due to COVID-19 and talks about ways to manage this situation. It talks about how certain groups can be mentally affected by COVID-19 and healthcare workers are handling it. Also informing on the mental health services already enacted in certain places during COVID-19.  This piece talks about various strategies to make the most optimal mental health services like to have individualized care, to know the most effective strategies, to expand insurance coverage of mental health, recognize flaws and weaknesses of some methods, etc. This article also mentions how it would be possible to turn COVID-19 into an opportunity to improve mental health for everyone which I think is an important idea. This source is definitely useful since it is really close to, if not exactly, the topic I want to write my speech about. The information is reliable because the authors of this article are experts in the psychiatry and mental health topics. There were a lot of authors collaborating on this paper, two of them were PhD. Carmen Moreno who works at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health in Madrid and Til Wykes from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. The Lancet journal where this article was published is a very well-known, old, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journal so the journal itself gives this article more credibility. This source would not be biased because it is a scholarly journal where scientists publish their research based on actual observations and facts.  This source is helpful because it suggests ways to make optimal mental health care services addressing how to make mental health care services as effective and not too costly as possible. Also, I think a particularly helpful part of this paper is it addresses who in the community may be at risk for more mental health problems and how. This article helped validate my beliefs that COVID-19 caused and will continue to cause an increase in mental health problems and we need to do something to help the mental health system.