This text is taken from our newsletter “Coronavirus mail” of April 25, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
Quebec healthcare workers are more resilient than one might think. Nearly two-thirds of them got through the pandemic without experiencing distress, and many overcame their discomfort after a few months, according to two Quebec studies.
“The waves of mental health followed the waves of the pandemic differently,” explains psychiatrist Nicolas Bergeron. His study, co-authored with three colleagues, has not yet been published, but has been seen by The duty.
Amid the pandemic’s chaotic start, his team began tracking the mental health of hundreds of healthcare workers in Montreal hospitals.
The findings she draws today show four “trends” specific to distress.
First, nearly 66% of the workers surveyed were classified as “resilient” because they never experienced “significant stress”. Some (8%) experienced psychological discomfort after only several months, at the turn of autumn 2020, and were classified in a trend called “delayed”. Others (7%) experienced the first moments of the pandemic very badly, but were able to get through it and get out of it after a year. They have been categorized as “sub-chronic”. Finally, 18% of healthcare workers experienced enormous stress at the start of the pandemic, but regained balance after only a few weeks. They were categorized as “recovered”.
“We don’t come to say that there is no distress, but that there is something dynamic and reassuring,” said Mr. Bergeron. At the height of the first wave, about 30% of workers suffered from clinical distress, while they were 20% at the peak of the second.
His study did not continue beyond the first waves, but the conclusion that emerges is all the same clear: “We see the number, and, overall, there are fewer people who are in distress of one wave to another. »
This distress is therefore “transient” and depends on several factors. There is certainly desensitization, because over time, “people are less afraid, they understand the real dangers a little better, how to protect themselves”.
Then, an in-depth study shows that the work environment also weighs in the balance of mental balance. “People just need to have a little more control over their work environment to have control over group cohesion. That’s where it paid the most [pour la santé mentale]. That’s what we think,” says Nicolas Bergeron.