Depression may make people more likely to believe COVID misinformation
Maija Kappler,
Experts have previously spoken about some of the reasons people might subscribe to vaccine misinformation. But a new study from the Massachusetts General Hospital may shed light on one underlying condition that might make people more vulnerable to that specific kind of incorrect information: depression.
“One of the notable things about depression is that it can cause people to see the world differently — sort of the opposite of rose-coloured glasses. That is, for some depressed people, the world appears as a particularly dark and dangerous place,” the study’s lead author Roy H. Perlis told the hospital’s news outlet .
“While we can’t conclude that depression caused this susceptibility, looking at a second wave of data at least told us that the depression came before the misinformation,” Perlis said. “It wasn’t that misinformation was making people more depressed.”
However, the results don’t indicate that depression causes people to be susceptible to fake news, he said. “Our result suggests that, by addressing the extremely high levels of depression in this country during COVID, we might decrease people’s susceptibility to misinformation. Of course, we can only show an association—we can’t show that the depression causes the susceptibility, but it’s certainly suggestive that it might.”
The pandemic itself has had devastating effects on people’s mental health: the survey found that depression levels in the United States were at least three times higher than what they were before COVID. That lines up with what’s happening here, too: one in three Canadians is struggling with their mental health, according to an Angus Reid poll released Monday, Jan. 24. That’s a jump up from one in four Canadians who said the same in November, before the Omicron wave. More worrying, seven per cent said their mental health is terrible and they’re barely getting by — almost double the four per cent who said the same since October 2020. Poorer mental health has also been reported in people between the ages of 18 and 34, and people in lower-income households.
No comments:
Post a Comment