A study based on more than 160,000 patients has found that the number of mortality among persons with mental health issues and intellectual disabilities has increased during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Before the pandemic, the mortality rates of persons with severe mental health issues were already higher than those of the general population. According to a study published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, mortality rates for people with mental health disorders and intellectual disabilities will rise during the first wave of COVID-19, which runs from March to June 2020.

This year’s World Mental Health Day subject is “Mental Health in an Unequal World,” and the study was published in the lead-up to that event.

During the first lockdown, deaths from COVID-19 were nine times higher in people with learning disabilities than in the general population, and nearly five times higher in people with eating disorders. People with personality disorders and dementia were four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population, and those with schizophrenia were three times more likely to die.

Patients’ clinical e-records from South London were analyzed using the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) technology that was part-funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has appointed Dr. Das-Munshi as an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist.

“People with severe mental health disorders and intellectual disabilities should be regarded at risk of COVID-19 mortality and other causes throughout the pandemic. Before, during and after COVID-19 outbreaks in patients with mental health issues we recommend prioritizing immunization and optimizing physical health care and suicide risk reduction.”

Researchers at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust used the Clinical Records Interactive System (CRIS) of the NIHR Maudsley BRC to examine death records of 167,122 individuals between 2019 and 2020. There were nine different mental health and intellectual disability problems that were examined, and the death ratios were divided up based on ethnicity. In addition to being compared to the five-year average weekly deaths in England and Wales (from 2015 to 2019), these were standardized by age and gender. According to this standardization procedure, these estimations were evaluated for the presence of local area-level impacts.

Psychiatric epidemiologist and clinical informatics professor Rob Stewart of King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) is the study’s senior author “Having the ability to gain knowledge from medical records is critical, as our findings demonstrate. During our nearly 15 years of working with the Maudsley’s CRIS platform, one of our primary goals has been to draw attention to mortality and health disparities. “We’ve been able to track the COVID-19 pandemic’s progress and its impact on mental health services because CRIS information is updated weekly.”

Mental health and intellectual disability-related deaths decreased from July to September 2020 due to a decrease in COVID-19 cases and a relaxation of lockdowns, but they remained twice as high as in the general population, a level that was close to that before the pandemic.

People with severe mental health disorders and intellectual disabilities in South Asia and the Caribbean were 2.5 times more likely to die during the epidemic era than they were in the year preceding to the pandemic. There was also a higher death risk for those with severe mental health disorders and intellectual disabilities who were White British or Black African.