Project 466668

In addition to causing over 4.5 million deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to extensive disruption in peoples social and economic lives. Some groups of individuals, such as women and ethnic minorities, have been facing a disproportionate burden during this time. The additional obstacles these individuals have been facing have the potential to affect their mental health negatively. The objective of this proposed systematic review is to determine if groups of individuals who are known to have been disproportionately affected by the consequences of COVID-19 have also experienced worse mental health since pandemic onset compared to pre-pandemic and over the course of the pandemic. This is a sub-study of a large ongoing systematic review (https://www.depressd.ca/).Systematic searches of MEDLINE (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCO), EMBASE (Ovid), Web of Science Core Collection: Citation Indexes, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (Chinese), Wanfang (Chinese), medRxiv (preprints), and Open Science Framework Preprints (preprint server aggregator) have been conducted since April 2020 and are ongoing. Eligible studies must report on mental health symptoms across time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in at-risk populations (e.g., racial/ethnic minority groups, immigrants, sex/gender minorities, women, indigenous populations, individuals of low socioeconomic status, individuals with a pre-existing mental health or medical condition, health care workers). Differences in mental health changes between vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations will be estimated. If there are sufficient data for each group, a meta-analysis will be done to synthesize differences. A similar approach will be adopted for the assessment of longitudinal outcomes across the pandemic.