While the pandemic left millions of people worldwide with lasting COVID-19 effects, it also fueled a research and healthcare focus that Thida Thant, MD, and colleagues have long promoted – the overlap of physical and mental illness.
Some surveys suggest as many as a quarter of the 775 million-plus people infected with SARS-CoV-2 had lingering symptoms at three months out, a phenomenon coined long COVID and now ranked a top research priority in the country. Many of those cases (some studies suggest a majority) included neurological and/or mental health issues.
“I was glad to see a stronger focus on that mind-body connection, the understanding that you could have a psychiatric symptom or illness develop as the result of a physical illness,” said Thant, a psychiatrist who specializes in the intersection between chronic disease and mental illness. “And not just in the coping sort of a way, but directly, as a physiologic result.”
The link between mental illness and long COVID is not novel, said Thant, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. There are mental health connections between heart disease and other respiratory viral illness.
“But historically, there’s always been this sort of divide, and long COVID has really taught us all that that overlap is there,” said Thant, who works with patients at the UCHealth Post-COVID clinic and is the director of the Psychiatric Consultation for the Medically Complex Program at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
Thant, who recently joined colleagues in publishing guidance on treating long COVID mental health disorders for the American Psychiatric Association, shared more about the issues she sees in practice in the Q&A below.