Life is pretty terrible at the moment. For the past three years, there have been unrelenting crises, disasters and unforeseeable obstacles to overcome: bushfires, COVID-19 lockdowns, floods, Delta and more protracted lockdowns, Omicron, war in Ukraine, an RBA rate increase, more floods, another RBA increase.
New data shows Australians are faring worse than ever. A study from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods tracked how well people were doing between 2020 and 2022. The answer? Not well.
Across 11 surveys conducted between February 2020 (prior to lockdowns) and April 2022, around 3500 Australian adults ranked how satisfied they were in life, how lonely they were feeling and how much they were earning. The research was funded by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Psychological distress among those aged 18 to 44 was 10% higher across 2020 and 2021 than pre-pandemic, with women, younger adults, Victorians and low-income households most affected. Distress surged during lockdowns, with 1.42 times as many people reporting they were so sad nothing could cheer them up. While distress started to decrease as restrictions were eased, we’re still not back to normal.
Our social lives haven’t bounced back either: prior to COVID-19 two in three people had face-to-face social engagements at least once a week, but that now sits at around one in two. Despite our lack of a social calendar, social cohesion remains above pre-COVID-19 levels.
Loneliness peaked across the first wave of COVID-19, with nearly half of respondents saying they were lonely at least some of the time — now, it’s about a third. But loneliness didn’t impact everyone the same way: those in disadvantaged areas or born in a non-English-speaking country felt more isolated than others.
Life satisfaction has been on the decline since the 2020 bushfires, with a quarter of respondents recording a “significant drop”. It hit those aged 18 to 24 hardest, as they missed out on school, going to university campuses and travel (though for those aged 75 and above there was a small increase in life satisfaction).
We can’t blame it all on COVID-19. Lead author Nicholas Biddle told Crikey that economic circumstance was a key driver of psychological distress. “It might well be that COVID-19 effects drop off but that the economic effects will continue to keep satisfaction at relatively low levels,” he said.
“I would be surprised if life satisfaction returned to late-2019 levels in the absence of a more stable economic and also health environment.”
While household income and hours worked dropped across lockdowns, government subsidies and payments strived to combat financial stress. As of April this year, financial stress had about returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, although a lift in inflation will have changed this.
It’s this uncertainty around costs of living and health impacts that cause mental turmoil, Biddle said. The data showed an increase in life satisfaction after the first wave of COVID-19, when things looked as though they would return to normal — showing optimism about the future drives contentment.
“What’s happened since is that there is no sense of going back to normal,” Biddle said. “There’s ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks, fires, floods but also external factors and internal factors which are constantly driving pressure.”
Not only did COVID-19 make us poorer, more depressed and less social, but those the virus killed lost an average of 2.7 years of life. More than 10,000 Australians have died from COVID-19 — the vast majority of whom were killed this year, making the virus the fourth most common cause of death.
Australia has had one of the lowest case-fatality rates in the world, along with one of the lowest average years of life lost.
