Handwashing and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder During COVID-19 Concerning Increased Negative Mental Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COVID-19 has been identified as a virus spread to the respiratory system by minute airborne particles. This method of dispersion is in contrast to its originally anticipated large particle fomite transmission. Although COVID-19 dissemination has been found to be airborne, a continuous health directive to limit contagion during the pandemic was to improve handwashing. Persistent handwashing may aggravate obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), diminishing mental health. With a modest value to handwashing in controlling the spread of COVID-19, determining if the handwashing directive increased the incidence of OCD, promoting negative mental health, is pertinent. A limited review of the parameter “handwashing, mental health, COVID-19, OCD” searched six relevant databases. The result was that negative mental health related to increased handwashing was evident both for those already diagnosed with OCD and regarding new cases of OCD throughout the duration of the pandemic. The exception was for those very few OCD patients demonstrating resilience or on stable medication. The conclusion is that health officials are advised to update details of their health directives as information becomes available during a pandemic. Concerning COVID-19, the directive to concentrate on handwashing should have been modified once it was known that spread of the virus by fomite transmission was improbable, as doing so would have reduced the incidence of OCD and improved mental health of those experiencing OCD. Regarding improved mental health, further OCD research is indicated regarding both resilience and stable medication under pandemic conditions when increased hand-washing is advised.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".