Duration of Lockdown and Mental Health

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown has disrupted mental well-being of individual. A number of studies provide evidence that lockdown is associated with higher level of stress and anxiety that contribute to deteriorating mental wellbeing of individuals. The general conclusion of those studies is unidirectional meaning more lockdown days lead to more deterioration of mental health. However, resilience argument state that if people get more time with families and loved ones, their resilience level will improve and as a result mental wellbeing improves as well. As lockdown brings the opportunity to spend more time with families, this study hypothesise that mental health gets affected at the early days of lockdown but starts to improve at a later stage. Using data from UK household longitudinal data and adopting appropriate statistical tests, this study finds that the relationship between lockdown days and mental health is U-shaped, meaning that mental health becomes worse in the early days of lockdown but improves at a later stage. We have found that mental health starts improving after 54 days since the start of lockdown for the full sample. The results also indicate that females adopt much quicker that males. The average time females take to recover is 34.4 days whereas males take 75 days to recover.