Mental health is one of the areas that poses the most challenges today to the National Health System, which in recent years has seen a significant increase in consultations for disorders such as anxiety or depression.
Behind this increase there are a host of factors, as explained Alexander de la Torreprofessor and principal investigator of the Psychiatric Epidemiology and Mental Health Research Group of the Complutense University of Madrid.
«We are in complicated times for many people. We have experienced a pandemic that has forced many adaptations to be made in daily life and has caused situations such as job loss or overcrowding at home, among other stressors of daily life. In the transition to the post-pandemic, there was also the war in Ukraine, which has had a global impact and has been noted in the increase in prices, among other conditions. These and other different stressors have joined other factors that were previously having an impact, such as the immediacy that governs our society, in which everything has to be fast. Wave dictatorship of happinessesa happycracia which is seen so much on social networks where it seems that everything always has to be perfect and a positive image must be shown. All of this is causing a worsening of the mental health of Spaniards in general and young people in particular,” says De la Torre.
“This worsening and this increase in consultations has been seen for a long time,” corroborates Carmen Moreno, section head at the Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the Gregorio Marañón University Hospital in Madrid. «The confinement situation derived from the pandemic has been able to act as catalyst. It has had an impact on young people who were going through a time in which socialization is key because it has made them deprived of the possibility of socializing. The return to normality for a reasonably large percentage of people has proven more difficult. That, recently, could have been a conditioning, but it was undoubtedly a trend that we had already seen for years before the pandemic,” he points out.
In addition to anxiety or depression problems, which are estimated to affect up to 15% of the population throughout their lives, eating disorder problems have increased significantly in recent years, especially in young people. says De la Torre. “Some studies show an increase of up to four times in the number of cases.”