Intern Health Study Findings Show Mental Health Toll of Chinese Doctors in the Time of COVID-19

The Michigan Health Lab published a story about a rigorous study that showed depression and anxiety symptoms that worsened among medical residents in Shanghai, as well as fear of workplace violence, in early 2020.

By Kara Gavin

They worked in hospitals hundreds of miles from the epicenter of COVID-19. Their city of 24 million people locked down hard enough, and did enough testing, that it only had a few hundred cases of the disease.

But hundreds of young Chinese doctors in a new study still experienced a sharp drop in mood, a  rise in depression and anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of their fear of workplace violence, in just the first month of the coronavirus pandemic.

The new findings, published in JAMA Network Open by an American and Chinese team, show in stark terms the potential mental toll of being a frontline healthcare worker in the time of COVID-19.

The rise in symptoms among 385 first year medical residents in Shanghai contrasts with data from members of the previous year’s crop of residents who took part in the same study from 2018 to 2019.

Where this year’s class saw sharp change across most measures of mental health and workplace violence during the first half of the training year, last year’s class had stable scores at the same point in their training. Other research in Chinese and American residents has shown that the strain of first year medical training is linked to a sharp rise in depressive symptoms over pre-residency scores.

“Even before this pandemic, the levels of depression and anxiety symptoms among our healthcare workers were high and our findings indicate that they are getting worse,” says Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D., the University of Michigan psychiatrist and neuroscientist who leads the Intern Health Study that yielded the data. “As it is clear that this pandemic will be with us for the foreseeable future, we need to prioritize the well-being of our healthcare workers, not only for themselves, but also for the patients that will need them in the coming months and year.”

Sen worked with colleagues from U-M’s Michigan Neuroscience Institute, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, to gather and analyze the data.

Read the rest of the story on the Michigan Health Lab blog.