Disability and mental health in the pandemic

Mental Health Support

12 May 2021

The Office of National Statistics' most recent report into coronavirus (published on 9 April 2021), and its impact on people with disabilities, reveals that stress and anxiety levels remain higher than for non-disabled people.

Using data collected during the latest national lockdown in February 2021,the ONS discovered that 78% of disabled people said they were worried about the effect of Covid-19 on their life. For non-disabled people, this figure was lower at 69%.

In terms of well-being, the impact of coronavirus continues to have a greater negative impact on people with disabilities. Survey respondents indicated that the pandemic:

makes their mental health worse (46% for disabled people and 29% for non-disabled people)
they are feeling like a burden on others (25% and 10%)
they are feeling stressed and anxious (67% and 54%)
they are feeling lonely (49% and 37%)
they spend too much time alone (42% and 31%)
they have no one to talk to about their worries (24% and 16%)

In addition:

Disabled people had on average poorer well-being ratings than non-disabled people across all four well-being measures (life satisfaction, feeling that things done in life are worthwhile, happiness and anxiety).
For both disabled and non-disabled people, life satisfaction and happiness ratings were poorer in February 2021 than in September 2020; compared with a period prior to the coronavirus pandemic (in the year ending June 2019), all well-being ratings of disabled and non-disabled people remained poorer in February 2021.
Disabled people tended to be less optimistic than non-disabled people about life returning to normal in the short term: around a fifth (20%) of disabled people compared with over a quarter (27%) of non-disabled people thought that life will return to normal in less than six months.

To read the report in full: Coronavirus and the social impacts on disabled people in Great Britain - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)