Based on nationally representative panel data (N person-years=40,020; N persons=18,704; Panel Labour Market and Social Security; PASS) from 2018 to 2022, we investigate how mental health changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ time-distributed fixed effects regressions to show that mental health (Mental Health Component Summary Score of the SF-12) decreased from the first COVID-19 wave in 2020 onward, leading to the most pronounced mental health decreases during the Delta wave, which began in August 2021. In the summer of 2022, mental health had not returned to baseline levels. An analysis of the subdomains of the mental health measure indicates that long-term negative mental health changes are mainly driven by declines in psychological well-being and calmness. Furthermore, our results indicate no clear patterns of heterogeneity between age groups, sex, income, education, migrant status, childcare responsibilities or pre-COVID-19 health status. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have had a uniform effect on mental health in the German adult population and did not lead to a widening of health inequalities in the long run.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Matthias Collischon and Alexander Patzina are grateful for a grant from the Hans Boeckler Foundation (HBS, project number 2023-40-4).

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The study used ONLY openly available human data that were originally located at: Intitute for Employment Research (Germany) https://doi.org/10.5164/IAB.FDZD.2312.en.v1

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