How the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting mental health

In the year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic, billions of lives around the world have been upended. Experts have warned of the mental health toll amid an increase in reports of anxiety, depression and distress. “From the very beginning of the pandemic, those of us who worked in the field knew that there … would be a mental health crisis,” Dr Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and author of The Psychology of Pandemics, told Al Jazeera.