Booster shots are available for those with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and serious depression. A higher risk of serious COVID-19 disease and death is connected to experiencing a psychiatric illness. Mood disorders should be included in the CDC’s list of diseases that put patients at risk for acute COVID-19, according to specialists.
The announcement comes just weeks after the CDC included mood disorders in its range of medical problems that put individuals at increased risk of getting very ill from COVID-19, which also includes diabetes, obesity, and pregnancy. While mental health professionals and researchers have long argued that it is just as vital to general well-being as body health, health insurance systems don’t often treat it that way, so the shift wasn’t inevitable.
The adjustment considerably expands the number of people who are eligible for COVID-19 booster doses in the United States. Per the National Institute of Mental Health, 19.4 million adults in the United States, or 7.8% of the population, experienced at least 1 severe depressive event in 2019.
A meta-analysis that was released the previous month in the journal JAMA Psychiatry and identified a link between pre-existing mood problems and a greater risk of getting hospitalized and passing away from COVID-19. The study looked at 21 studies and covered over 91 million participants. It did not, though, discover a correlation between these mental health issues and being more physically vulnerable to getting COVID-19.
Those with mood disorders and a secondary diagnosis were already qualified for booster doses. However, those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression aren’t diagnosed for physical health problems at the same frequency as the rest of the community.
“If you walk into a clinic, and you say to the nurse or the doctor, ‘I have schizophrenia, I have depression, I have bipolar disorder,’ they aren’t likely going to diagnose the other medical problems. It’s just a bias that we have in our medical system,” declared the co-author of the report.
