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Record W4416672895 · doi:10.1093/joccuh/uiaf067

Sickness absence due to common mental disorders and antidepressant prescription among health and social care workers during compared with before the COVID-19 pandemic: a nationwide register study of the Swedish population

2025· article· en· W4416672895 on OpenAlex
Stefanie Kirchner, Katalin Gémes, Pontus Josefsson, Josep María Haro, Mireia Félez-Nóbrega, Heidi Taipale, Marit Sijbrandij, Anke B. Witteveen, Maria Melchior, Giulia Caggiu, Claudia Conflitti, Antonio Lora, Matteo Monzio Compagnoni, Jakob Bergström, Ellenor Mittendorfer‐Rutz

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Occupational Health · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicCOVID-19 and Mental Health
Canadian institutionsCentre for Addiction and Mental Health
FundersVetenskapsrådet
KeywordsMedical prescriptionAntidepressantMental healthPandemicHealth careOccupational safety and healthWarrant

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

OBJECTIVES: Essential workers, particularly in health care and social services, were critical during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet their mental health outcomes remain understudied. We examined changes in (1) sickness absence (SA) due to common mental disorders (CMDs), and (2) antidepressant prescription in health and social care workers during versus pre-pandemic periods. METHODS: Using Swedish national registers, we included health care and social workers (aged 19-65 years) from 2018 to 2021. We compared quarterly incidence rate (IR) trends for SA >90 days due to CMDs, and for antidepressant prescriptions, across 2 periods: pre-pandemic (January 2018 to February 2020) and during the pandemic (March 2020 to December 2021) using interrupted time-series analysis. Analyses accounted for seasonality and were stratified by age, sex, and education. RESULTS: There was no evidence of a difference in IR trends for SA >90 days or for antidepressant prescription pre-pandemic versus during the pandemic for the entire sector. However, trends of IR for antidepressant prescription increased among workers in medical laboratories (8.7% per quarter change; 95% CI, 4.4%-13.1%) and hospitals (1.5%; 95% CI, 0.6%-2.5%) and decreased per quarter for ambulance transports (5.4%; 95% CI, 0.4-10.0%). Women (10.9%; 95% CI, 7.2%-14.7%) and highly educated individuals (10.0%; 95% CI, 4.1%-16.1%) working in medical laboratories as well as 19-25-year-olds working in primary and dental care (7.3%; 95% CI, 1.7%-13.1%) also experienced an increase in antidepressant prescription. CONCLUSIONS: Although overall trends in SA >90 days and in antidepressant prescription remained stable, certain occupational and sociodemographic groups were found to be affected in regard to antidepressant prescription. These groups warrant targeted support in future health crises.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.060
Threshold uncertainty score0.991

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.077
GPT teacher head0.438
Teacher spread0.362 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it