Impact of the COVID-19 virus and confinement on the mental health of the tunisian population: Anxiety and depression

IntroductionThe 2019 Coronavirus disease epidemic is a public health emergency of international concern and poses a challenge to psychological resilience.ObjectivesTo study the psychological repercussions in terms of anxiety and depression of the Coronavirus pandemic on the Tunisian population.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical study. We used an online questionnaire on Facebook, on June 2020. The heteroquestionnaire included epidemiological data and two scales: the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI Form Y-1) to evaluate the anxiety level at the time of the study, and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ 9) to detect a characterized depressive episode.ResultsWe included 121 participants. They had an average age of 36.52 years with a sex ratio (M/F) of 0.41. The mean STAI score was 43.12 while the PHQ score was 7.46, indicating that 30.8% of the participants suffered from depression. Both scores were correlated to female sex (p=0.01 for STAI and p=0.02 for PHQ), a history of anxiety (p