Depression can affect the belief in lies about COVID vaccines

MONDAY, Jan. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines is abundant and people with depression are more likely than others to fall in love with it, a new study has found.

“One of the remarkable things about depression is that it can make people see the world differently – something like the opposite of pink glasses. That is, for some depressed people, the world seems like a particularly dark and dangerous place,” said lead author. Mr. Roy Perlis. He is the assistant director of research in the psychiatric ward at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“We wondered if people who see the world this way might be more susceptible to believing in vaccine misinformation. “If you already think the world is a dangerous place, you may be more likely to believe that vaccines are dangerous – even though they are not,” Perlis said in a hospital statement.

The lies cover the entire range, from the claim that vaccines are dangerous to the assumption that they contain microchips.

For the study, Perlis and colleagues analyzed the responses of more than 15,400 adults in the United States who completed an online survey between May and July 2021. Participants first completed a questionnaire on depressive symptoms and then responded to statements about COVID-19 vaccines.

Depression rates among participants were at least three times higher than before the pandemic, the study found. People with depression are 2.2 times more likely to support at least one of the four false claims about COVID-19 vaccines. And those who supported at least one false claim were half as likely to be vaccinated and 2.7 times more likely to report resistance to the vaccine.

Unvaccinated people are known to be more likely to develop severe COVID-19 and die from it than people who are vaccinated.

The researchers also asked more than 2,800 participants to complete another study two months later. The results showed that those who had depression in the first study were twice as likely as those without depression to support more misinformation about vaccines in the second study than in the first.

The study was published online on January 21 JAMA Network Open.

“Although we cannot conclude that the depression caused this susceptibility, looking at the second wave of data at least told us that the depression came before the misinformation. That is not to say that misinformation makes people more depressed, “said Perlis.

The researchers also found that the link between depression and the belief in vaccine misinformation was not due to receiving news from various sources and was not limited to people with certain political beliefs or demographic groups.

The findings are significant given that mental health in the United States deteriorated during the pandemic.

“Our result suggests that by tackling the extremely high levels of depression in this country during COVID, we can reduce people’s susceptibility to misinformation,” Perlis said. “Of course, we can only show association – we can’t show that depression causes susceptibility, but it certainly suggests that it can.”

More information

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlines myths and facts about COVID-19 vaccines.