Participants and Study design
This study was a cross-sectional design and was carried out during the second wave of COVID-19, from 1 July to 15 July, 2020. Infected inpatients were recruited by cluster sampling in Beijing Ditan Hospital, which was the designated isolation hospital for COVID-19 infections in Beijing, China. We invited 180 inpatients from five isolated wards to participate our study, including the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview and self-reported questionnaire. The Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview was conducted on the day before discharge from the hospital for each participant. Two experienced clinical psychiatrists conducted the systematic assessment of psychiatric symptoms by the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview. 119 inpatients completed this study, with a response rate of 66.1%. Participants meeting the following criteria were included: (1) inpatients infected by the COVID-19; (2) Chinese citizens who understand Chinese; (3) be infected during the second wave of pandemic in Beijing.
All participants were informed of the purpose and procedures of the study before the survey began, and completing the survey implied online informed consent to participate the investigation. This survey was approved by the Beijing Ditan Hospital Ethics Committee.
Measures
Socio-demographic characteristics
A variety of scales and demographic data were collected in the study, including sex, age, nationality, education, clinically diagnosed type of infection, community risk (announced by Beijing municipal government during the second wave), annual income and history of mental disorder (confirmed by psychiatrist).
COVID-19 related factors
Participants were surveyed for the frequency of exposure to information or news related to COVID-19 by two items (i.e. “How many times do you browse the related information on the pandemic per day in the past two weeks?” and “How many hours do you browse the pandemic-related information per day in the past two weeks?”). The scoring criteria for such items are respectively from "0 times" to "20 times" with a total score of 21 points and from "0 hours" to "8 hours" with a total score of 8 points. The responses formed the composite score of exposure to COVID-19 related information (α = .52), with higher mean scores indicating a higher exposure to COVID-19 related information or news.
Participants were surveyed the perceived impact by COVID-19 by 4 items, including the impact on economic income, daily life, work or study, and interpersonal relationship. According to the comprehensive score of perceived impact (a=.73) after different answers to these items from 1 (totally not) to 5 (to a large extent), with higher scores indicating a greater perceived impact on COVID-19 pandemic.
Psychological factors
Loneliness and hope were assessed as two psychological factors associated with psychotic symptoms. 6-Item short version of De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale was used to assess loneliness [9]. For each item, participants were asked to indicate the extent to which corresponding situations had happened on a 5-point scale (1 = never; 5 = always), with Cronbach’s α = 0.70 ~ 0.76. For example, “I experience a general sense of emptiness”, “I miss having people around”. In this study, we calculated a composite loneliness score α = .55, with higher scores indicating higher loneliness.
Hope was assessed by the Hope Scale, which includes 12 items concerning feeling of hope, with validated Cronbach’s α = 0.74 ~ 0.84 [10]. The Hope Scale defined hope as the process of thinking about one’s goals, along with the motivation to move toward (agency subscale) and the ways to achieve (pathways scale) those goals. For example, “I energetically pursue my goals”, “I can think of many ways to get out of a jam”. Responses range on a 7-point scale, from 1 (definitely false) to 7 (definitely true). We calculated a composite hope score α = .91, with higher scores indicating higher hope.
Coping strategies
The 15-item COPE inventory was used to assess coping strategies participants used to manage their stress [11, 12]. It is comprised of 4 subscales: active coping, avoidant coping, emotion-focused coping, and acceptance coping. Participants were asked to rate how frequency they used each coping strategy on a 7-point scale from 1 (never) to 7 (always). For instance, “I concentrate my efforts on doing something about it”, “I pretend that it hasn’t really happened”, “I discuss my feelings with someone”, “I learn to live with it”. In this study, the composite cope subscale score α = 0.50 ~ 0.87, with higher scores indicating higher coping strategy in the corresponding subscale.
Social supports
Social supports were assessed by the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) [13], consisting of 12 items. The MSPSS comprises three subscales, i.e., perceived support from family, from friends and from a significant other. Items includes “There is a special person who is around when I am in need”, “I can talk about my problems with my friends”, and so on. Each item was rated on a 7-piont Likert scale, ranging from 1 (very strongly disagree) to 7 (very strongly agree). The composite social support was calculated α = 0.95, with higher scores indicating higher perceived social supports.
Psychotic symptoms
We measured generalized anxiety, state anxiety, depression, COVID-19 related PTSD, somatization, interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, paranoid ideation and psychoticism as psychotic symptoms.
Generalized anxiety was assessed by the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), which is a self-reported screening scale consisting of 7 items on a 4-point scale, from 1 (not at all) to 4 (nearly every day), with higher total score indicating severer anxiety symptoms [14]. The Chinese version of GAD-7 has been validated and demonstrated great reliability (α = 0.89) [15]. In our study, the cut-off score for anxiety symptoms was 12 [15], and internal consistency is excellent (α = 0.94).
Compared with the generalized anxiety, we also measure the state anxiety level of inpatients while hospitalized. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State (SASI-S) was used to screen the situation-related anxiety, consisting of 20 items on a 4-point scale, from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very much), with higher summative score indicating higher levels of state anxiety, and had demonstrated good internal consistency (α = 0.94) [16]. In present study, the cut-off score for state anxiety symptom was 41 [17], and the Cronbach’s α was 0.91.
Similar to GAD-7, the self-screen 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) was used to assess the frequency of the occurrence of depressive symptoms over the past two weeks on a 4-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (not at all) to 4 (nearly every day) [18]. It has been validated in China (Cronbach’s α = 0.86) [19], and we produced a summative score with higher scores indicating severer depressive symptoms (α = 0.91). We use a cut-off score at 14 in this study [18].
The Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R) was adapted to measure COVID-19 related PTSD [20]. It consists of 22 items on a 5-piont Likert-type scale (1 = not at all; 5= always) to produce a summative score with higher scores indicating higher level of events-related PTSD. Participants were asked to rate the frequency with which each symptom has occurred over the past week, and the event refers to COVID-19 event in present study. IES-R has been used in previous COVID-19 studies in China [21, 22]. We calculated a COVID-19 related PTSD composite score (α = 0.97), and used a cut-off score of 46 [23].
The somatization subscale, interpersonal sensitivity subscale, hostility subscale, paranoid ideation subscale and psychoticism subscale of Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) were used to assess the five specific psychotic symptoms [24]. Respondents rank each feeling item on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) during the past seven days, with higher scores indicating severer sub-dimensional symptoms. The present study demonstrated great internal consistency of the five subscales (α = 0.83 ~ 0.87). There were few studies providing BSI-53 subscale cut-off scores to diagnose specific psychiatric illness to our knowledge [25].
Data analysis
We used both the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview diagnostic outcome and self-reported clinical symptoms outcome to calculated the prevalence of psychotic symptoms among participants. Descriptive statistics for socio-demographic variables and M.I.N.I outcomes were first presented. Chi-square test was used to compare psychotic symptoms between males and females. Hierarchical linear regression models were used to explore the contribution of various factors to psychotic symptoms. Socio-demographic characteristics were first entered to test their relationship with psychotic symptoms in step 1, followed by COVID-19 related factors in step 2, psychological factors in step 3, cope strategies in step 4 and social support in model 5. In addition, we used the bias-corrected bootstrap method with 95% confidence intervals to test the regression models. All analyses were performed using SPSS version 23.0 and R version 4.0.2. Statistical significance level was set at 0.05 (two-sided).