Key research messages
Since April 2020, a number of surveys have been conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and several Australian universities to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australians. For more detailed information on these surveys refer to the AIHW Suicide & self-harm monitoring page.
The Household Impacts of COVID-19, conducted monthly by the ABS, collects information on the impact of COVID-19 across a range of key areas, including psychological distress. The Household Impacts of COVID-19 Survey found that young people and women often reported higher levels of concern due to COVID-19, with 28.0% of females experiencing loneliness during April/May, compared to 15.7% of males (ABS 2020a). In July 2020, 19.3% of females surveyed had used a mental health support service since March 2020 compared to 9.5% of males (ABS 2020b).
The Australian National University COVID-19 impact monitoring survey asked Australians about their experience of loneliness between January and August 2020 and found that 45.8% of Australian adults felt lonely some of the time during April, 36.1% in May and 40.5% in August (Biddle et al 2020).
The University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Institute has been running a weekly Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey since April 2020. In the initial survey, 20.0% of Australians reported feeling depressed and anxious 'most of the time'. Since April, the number of people saying they felt depressed or anxious most of the time has varied between 15.1 and 19.7% (COVID.5). For employed parents, if the youngest child was aged 5 to 11, they reported higher levels of mental distress, nearly quadruple from 7% since April to 27% in July (Broadway et al. 2020).