NYT: Mental Illness Raises the Risk of Severe Covid. The Question Is: Why?

[SNT Gatchaman]

People with psychiatric conditions are more likely to be hospitalized or die of the virus. Scientists have ideas about why that might be the case.
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As usual this all tends to read backwards, or at least missing the associations, direction of causality, and the wood for the trees, with few people connecting the dots. Ziyad Al-Aly offers a sensible initial comment —

When it comes to Covid risk, mental illness “shouldn’t be treated differently than you treat diabetes or heart disease or cancer,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System.

But elsewhere the commentary is —

They also have several hypotheses about why mental illness might make people more susceptible.

Many mental health conditions can lead to chronically high stress levels. And stress sabotages the immune system, flooding the body with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Those hormones make it harder to produce certain immune cells that are crucial for fighting off illnesses.

Elevated stress levels can also lead to persistently high blood pressure and more plaque deposits in the heart, contributing to cardiovascular disease — which is known to predispose people to more severe Covid infections.

A Covid infection raises the risk that anyone will develop a mental illness, even with no history of psychiatric disorders. […] In some patients, certain long Covid symptoms — depression, anxiety, fatigue, brain fog — might be signs that a Covid infection has exacerbated a pre-existing mental illness, Dr. Thant said.

So I guess we were all mentally ill, but just didn't know it until we hit perhaps 40, 50 or 60.

Sometimes worse outcomes from Covid have less to do with the mental illnesses themselves and more with external factors that sometimes accompany them. For example, people with mental illness are more likely to smoke and therefore have worse lung health

People with severe mental illnesses are also more likely to experience poverty and may not be able to afford health care. They may also struggle to get enough sleep, maintain a balanced diet and attend to other aspects of their health, Dr. Thant said. And the stigma around mental illness can prevent people from seeking medical care, Dr. Volkow said, which can be particularly critical when it comes to Covid.

That stigma of course being largely the predisposition, precipitant and perpetuation by medicine itself.

 

[rvallee]

Good grief this is a mess, Al-Aly aside. And so judgmental in most of the wrong ways. At its core is what even is the definition of mental illness, which the paragraph about Long Covid and pre-existing mental illness shows is just a giant dysfunctional clusterfuck. They're really stuck on mental illness about where medicine was in the late 19th century, and show no sign whatsoever of moving past the looping ruts they carved going round and round asserting the same nonsense.