Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns have been raised about its effect on mental health. Anxiety centered around contracting the virus has been a common mental health symptom throughout the pandemic. While necessary to control the spread of COVID-19, public health guidelines, such as social distancing, can make people feel isolated and lonely and further increase stress and anxiety. Financial stress, adapting to remote work, and dealing with online learning can all impact how we cope through the pandemic. While there has been some research on the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still much to be understood.
For instance, are there some groups of people who are having a harder time coping? If so, what are the sociodemographic factors that define these groups? Are they parents with young children, members of the LGBTQ+ community, older adults in long-term care homes, or ethnic and racial minorities? Luckily, researchers like Dr. Robert-Paul Juster, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addiction at the University of Montreal, are starting to collect data that will help answer these and other questions.
Stress As A Science
As a stress neuroscientist, Dr. Juster’s work involves studying the causes and consequences of chronic stress. Most of his career has focused on stressing participants out, in a controlled lab environment, and collecting their saliva to look at stress hormones. Dr. Juster and his team hope to understand how people respond to stress and how this might relate to their mental health. This type of research allows him and other researchers to better understand how stress ‘gets under the skin and skull’ to influence our bodies and brains.
According to Dr. Juster, stress is an adaptive part of our evolutionary history and thus is something we all experience. However, chronic stress can negatively affect both our physical and psychological health. In fact, most diseases are in some way influenced directly or indirectly by how we respond to stressors. Dr. Juster’s team is especially interested in teasing apart the role of biological sex as well as social and cultural gender in how we respond and cope to stress. Over the last 10 years, he’s dedicated much of his research career to trying to understand the stress experienced among members of the LGBTQ+ community.
It is important to emphasize that Dr. Juster’s work isn’t, however, all doom and gloom. His team is also very interested in identifying protective factors that help promote adaptive coping and resilience.
Coping Through COVID
While they may not be able to have participants easily come into the lab right now, Dr. Juster and his team of students have adapted the way that they do their research. Using a combination of online surveys and virtual interviews, they are now focusing their efforts on understanding how sex and gender relate to stress, coping, resilience, and mental health. What this means is that anyone and everyone can participate in some of this research. Being a neuroscientist myself, I was interested in learning more about the project and its importance. Below is some of what Dr. Juster had to say about his Coronavirus Crisis Competence survey.
The Coronavirus Crisis Competence Survey
The Coronavirus Crisis Competence survey is an online survey that takes about 30 minutes to complete. Our goal is to understand how sex and gender relate to stress, coping, resilience, and mental health. Together with numerous collaborators across Canada, we put together a series of classic questionnaires that look at various psychological and social factors. Because everyone on the planet is faced with the same stressor in the form of COVID-19, we predict that people will be experiencing poorer mental health overall.
We also expect that this might be more severe among different groups that experience unique forms of stigma and stress over and above COVID-19. For example, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous people, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, unemployed workers, and many more are having a really tough time with COVID-19. Collectively, we expect these groups and sub-groups (e.g., gender-diverse people) to be very stressed. But we also expect that these different groups will have among them hardy and resilient people who have faced adversity and are doing quite well during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, older gay men that have previously faced the HIV/AIDS pandemic and lost so many loved ones have already engaged in coping strategies in the past as a community that they are likely re-enacting today.
This is the concept of ‘crisis competence,’ the remarkably inspiring way in which groups of people who have faced adversity are able to face future adversity adaptively. This is a model of resilience that we want to understand in addition to identifying vulnerabilities experienced by different groups of people.
Is This Study The First Of Its Kind?
Many scientists around the world are currently conducting COVID-19 related research. It is well known that COVID-19 affects men, women, and gender diverse people in different ways. For example, men are more likely to die if infected, women are reporting higher distress, and many transgender people are struggling with access to health care. What is unique about our study is our measurement of sex, gender, and sexual orientation with various questionnaires. Also, our focus is on understanding not just risk factors that negatively influence health and well-being but also resilience factors.
Having participated in the study myself, I can attest to the fact that it was both exciting to be part of this very topical research and an eye-opening experience. If you, or someone you know, would like to participate in Dr. Juster’s study please visit this link: Coronavirus Crisis Competence Survey
Daniel Michaels is a neuroscientist with an interest in all things behavior, especially sexual behavior. If after reading his work, you’re filled with an unquenchable thirst for science, feel free to reach out to him at daniel.michaels.neuro@gmail.com.