Cyberchondria and Chinese Adolescent Mental Health in the Age of COVID-19 Pandemic

One of the far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has become the fertile soil of cyberchondria. Adolescents' mental health was severely hit by this by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic both due to the direct effects and its indirect effects on security. This study investigated and cyberchondria was associated with Chinese adolescents' mental health (i.e., well-being and depressive symptoms). Based on a large Internet sample ( = 1,108, 67.5 percent female, = 16.78 years), cyberchondria, psychological insecurity, mental health, and a series of covariates were assessed. Preliminary analyses were conducted in SPSS Statistics software and main analyses were conducted in Mplus. Path analyses indicated that (a) cyberchondria was negatively associated with well-being ( = -0.12, = 0.001) and positively associated with depressive symptoms ( = 0.17,