Viruses and mental health; Psychiatrists are beginning to understand the connection.

A positive mental outlook can help you overcome infections such as Covid-19 according to some recent data published by Psychiatrists.  Problems with your mental state such as having schizophrenia can have a detrimental effect on your recovery or survival from this or other diseases according to new research.

The immune system also may affect your mood as your body fights off a virus as well and can result in mood swings.

Psychiatrists are understanding that mental health and physical health are often intertwined according to a recent article in Vox.  Check out the article below

Psychiatrists are uncovering connections between viruses and mental health. They’re surprising.

Immune responses to viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may affect mental health, and vice versa. Doctors are uncovering exactly how.

By Brian Resnick  Dec 1, 2021

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, one of the biggest questions was: Why do some people get so much sicker than others? It’s a question that has forced researchers to confront some deep mysteries of the human body, and come to conclusions that have startled them.

By the fall of 2020, psychiatrists were reporting that among the many groups who were high risk, people with psychiatric disorders, broadly, seemed to be getting more severe forms of Covid-19 at a higher rate. Katlyn Nemani, an NYU neuropsychiatrist, decided to dig deeper, asking: Just how much more at risk, and which conditions?

In January, she and a group of colleagues published a study of 7,348 Covid-19 patients in New York. One finding was stark: People with a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis faced more than two and a half times the average person’s risk of dying from Covid-19, even after controlling for the many other factors that affect Covid-19 outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and demographic factors — age, sex, and race.

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