Covid, Brexit and Liz Truss mini-budget led to lasting decline in mental health, study finds

Brexit, Liz Truss’s mini-budget and other “shocks” over the last 10 years have led to a serious and lasting deterioration in the UK population’s mental health, research has found.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the first and second Covid lockdowns also triggered big rises in psychological distress, as measured by the number of people with depression and anxiety.The findings come as Prof Peter Fonagy prepares to publish the report of his long-waited government-commissioned inquiry into the dramatic increases in recent years in diagnoses of mental illness, ADHD and autism. It will be published on Friday amid concern that those conditions help explain why a record 2.8 million Britons are too sick to work and almost 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 have become “Neets” – not in education, employment or training.Researchers led by Dr Annie Jeffery of University College London used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study of 87,857 people aged 16 and older, which was collected every year between 2009 and 2024, to estimate the mental health impact of those five “systemic shocks”.“The past decade or so has been tumultuous, shaped by multiple overlapping shocks and ongoing uncertainty and instability that have impacted mental health in Britain,” said Jeffery.“We have shown that major government decisions and current global events can have substantial impacts on people’s mental health.”All five events caused immediate and serious damage to overall mental wellbeing across the UK. But the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and first pandemic lockdown in March 2020 caused the most damage, the research team found.Their analysis of the general health questionnaire’s GHQ-12 screening tool, which measures mental health, found that the UK’s vote to leave the European Union led to an increase in overall mental ill-health equivalent to about 120,000 more people overall seeking a GP’s help for depression.However, the first Covid lockdown, when the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, told people to “stay at home”, had a much larger impact, as measured by a much bigger rise in the UK’s GHQ-12 score. That jump equated to about 900,000 more people in total visiting a family doctor because they had developed symptoms of depression, Jeffery said.Russia’s offensive against Ukraine in February 2022 led to about 15,000 more Britons a month seeking a GP’s help for depression. After Liz Truss’s mini-budget in September 2022, which proved disastrous for the UK economy, about 23,000 more people a month visited their family doctor’s surgery because they were depressed.“We observed increased psychological distress immediately after the Brexit referendum and the first Covid-19 lockdown, with more insidious monthly increases in psychological distress after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 mini-budget,” said Jeffrey.Andy Bell, the chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health thinktank, said: “There is clear evidence that Covid had a big impact on mental health. And it makes sense that the other ‘shocks’ listed here would do so, either directly, by making people feel less secure and less connected, or as after-effects, for example the cost of living crisis.“It’s also clear that rising distress in the population is not due to a single cause but the effect of all these things added together, made worse by years of austerity giving fewer buffers against ‘shocks’ like this.”Mental ill-health costs the UK £300bn a year, according to research by the thinktank.The UCL-led team’s findings have been published in the journal BMJ Mental Health. They found that psychological distress had been increasing in the UK from 2009 to a degree that was clinically significant but accelerated from 2015 onwards. Even though the most recent of the five events occurred in 2022, the heightened distress in the population that followed them has persisted and not gone back to the much lower levels seen before 2016, they found.The total number of people in England in contact with NHS mental health services almost doubled from 2.64 million in 2016-17 to 4.13 million in 2024-25. The number of new referrals the NHS receives every month for mental ill-health has jumped from 360,000 in April 2022 to 530,000 in July 2026 – a jump of 47%.The huge rise in demand for care – driven by “shocks” causing anxiety, stress and worry – has left NHS services struggling “as more people than ever are reaching out for support”, said Tom Pollard, the mental health charity Mind’s director of policy, campaigns and public affairs.