Condiciones Socioeconómicas y de Salud Mental durante la Pandemia por COVID-19

The associated situations with the COVID19 pandemic promote mental health risks that researchers should attend to. This study aimed to show the level of the risk to mental health because of socioeconomic (sex, employment status, and age) or COVID19 situations: quarantine, symptoms or suspected COVID19, death of near people, physical or depression illness, or possible comorbidity. We worked with 15,335 Mexican, with a mean of 26 years old (SD=11.95), 52% single (8,001), 52% with a bachelor’s degree (7,910), 60% women (9,175), 44% in quarantine (6,769), 46% partially in quarantine (4,193), and 10% that they were not in quarantine (1,513). We used one causal correlational study throughout the WebApp application of the Questionnaire of Mental Health Screening in COVID19 (Alpha= 0.96; 62 of explained variance), programed by Linux®, PHP ®, HTML®, CSS ®, and JavaScript®), and constituted by four sections. The first section assessed COVID19 status. The second section assessed socioeconomic condition. The third section assessed mental health symptoms: acute stress, disengagement/anger, generalized anxiety/sadness, health anxiety, somatization, and avoidance. The fourth section assessed discrete nominal conditions: drug use and violence. Latent variables derivate of 104 iterations with 102 parameters (t[496] = 387077.84, p=.000), a CFI = 0.932, a TLI = 0.920, a RMSEA = 0.064 (0.063 – 0.064), and a SRMR = 0.047. Results showed that avoidance predicted acute stress. Acute stress predicted anxiety related to health. The anxiety related to health predicted generalized anxiety/sadness and somatization. And generalized anxiety/sadness predicted disengagement/anger in people. Thus, findings indicated that being women, unemployed, less than 29 or more than 65 years old, in quarantine, presenting COVID19 symptoms or suspected diagnosis, and reported comorbidity because of physical illness or depression was associated with the risk of mental health conditions. Next, studies should assess the impact of distance psychological interventions on the risk of developing acute and posttraumatic stress.