Helga Ask, Lars T. Westlye, Ole A. Andreassen & Unnur A. Valdimarsdotttir
Department of Mental Disorders, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway Norwegian Centre for Mental Disorders Research (NORMENT), Division of Mental Health and Addiction, Oslo University Hospital & Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. Center of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland. Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
The COVIDMENT project is a large-scale multinational collaboration between Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Sweden, and the UK which was established to significantly advance current knowledge of mental morbidity trajectories during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was funded by NordForsk and combine longitudinally measured mental health questionnaire data of >450,000 individuals with data-rich record linkages to the national health registry resources. In addition, detailed pre-pandemic data and genotype data is available for the majority of the cohorts. The COVIDMENT resources are well powered for a systematic exploration of trans-national heterogeneity in pandemic effects, including how variations in mitigating responses to COVID-19 pandemic and disease burden across countries impact on psychiatric symptoms and disorders, both in the general population and in specific risk groups. The key objective of the COVIDMENT initiative is overlapping with the aims of environMENTAL and will provide an important network for our investigation on psychiatric symptoms and disorders during and after the pandemic.