Study Links Brexit, First Covid Lockdown and Truss Mini-Budget to Lasting UK Mental Health Decline

The team used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, covering 87,857 people aged 16 and older, collected every year from 2009 to 2024. It estimated the mental health impact of five systemic shocks: the Brexit referendum, the first and second Covid lockdowns, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Truss's mini-budget. Distress was measured using the GHQ-12 screening tool.

Dr Annie Jeffery, who led the research, said the past decade or so has been tumultuous, shaped by multiple overlapping shocks and ongoing uncertainty and instability that have affected mental health in Britain. She said the study showed that major government decisions and current global events can have substantial impacts on people's mental health. All five events caused immediate and serious damage to overall mental wellbeing across the UK, but the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020 caused the most damage, the research team found.

The analysis found the Brexit vote led to an increase in overall mental ill-health equivalent to about 120,000 more people seeking a GP's help for depression. The first Covid lockdown, when then prime minister Boris Johnson told people to stay at home, had a much larger impact, equating to about 900,000 more people visiting a family doctor because they had developed symptoms of depression. Russia's offensive against Ukraine in February 2022 led to about 15,000 more Britons a month seeking a GP's help for depression. After Truss's September 2022 mini-budget, about 23,000 more people a month visited their family doctor because they were depressed.

Jeffery said increased psychological distress was observed immediately after the Brexit referendum and the first Covid-19 lockdown, with more insidious monthly increases in psychological distress after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 mini-budget. The findings were published as Prof Peter Fonagy prepares to publish the report of his government-commissioned inquiry into the recent increases in diagnoses of mental illness, ADHD and autism. It is due on Friday, amid concern that those conditions help explain why a record 2.8 million Britons are too sick to work and almost 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 are Neets, meaning not in education, employment or training.

Andy Bell, chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health thinktank, said there is clear evidence that Covid had a big impact on mental health. He said it makes sense that the other shocks would do so, either directly by making people feel less secure and less connected, or as after-effects such as the cost of living crisis. He said rising distress in the population is not due to a single cause but the effect of all these things added together, made worse by years of austerity giving fewer buffers against shocks like this. The thinktank says mental ill-health costs the UK 300 billion pounds a year.

The UCL-led team found that psychological distress had been increasing in the UK from 2009 to a degree that was clinically significant but accelerated from 2015 onwards. Although the most recent of the five events occurred in 2022, the heightened distress in the population that followed them has persisted and not gone back to the much lower levels seen before 2016. In England, the total number of people in contact with NHS mental health services almost doubled from 2.64 million in 2016-17 to 4.13 million in 2024-25. The number of new referrals the NHS receives every month for mental ill-health rose from 360,000 in April 2022 to 530,000 in July 2026, a 47% increase.

Tom Pollard, the mental health charity Mind's director of policy, campaigns and public affairs, said the huge rise in demand for care, driven by shocks causing anxiety, stress and worry, has left NHS services struggling as more people than ever are reaching out for support.

Editor's Summary A UCL-led study in BMJ Mental Health links Brexit, the first Covid lockdown, the Ukraine invasion and Liz Truss's mini-budget to lasting increases in UK psychological distress, with the first lockdown and Brexit producing the largest immediate effects. The findings coincide with a government-commissioned inquiry into rising mental illness, ADHD and autism diagnoses, and with NHS mental health services facing record demand. The researchers say distress has not returned to pre-2016 levels.