@article{639c2d84d3f24a0b89f89dc31643167d,
title = "Mental health of family, friends, and co-workers of COVID-19 patients in Japan",
abstract = "As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic rages on, the mental health of both the infected and non-infected is a rising concern. We used administrative survey data (16402 responses in the last two weeks) using a chatbot on LINE, the most popular social networking service (SNS) in Japan, to show that people with COVID-19 patients in a close setting had higher psychological distress level than those without. We believe that the results indicate an urgent need to prioritize the establishment and implementation of mental health and psychosocial support tailored to family, close relatives, and friends of COVID-19 patients.",
keywords = "COVID-19, Japan, Mental health",
author = "Yuta Tanoue and Shuhei Nomura and Daisuke Yoneoka and Takayuki Kawashima and Akifumi Eguchi and Shoi Shi and Nahoko Harada and Hiroaki Miyata",
note = "Funding Information: Ethical approval was granted by the ethics committee of Keio University School of Medicine, under authorization number 20190338. We only obtained data from those who have given consent for the prefecture that administers the questionnaire to provide their response data to a third party for research use. Respondents must give their consent on the LINE chatbot before they proceed to the questionnaire response page. The present work was supported in part by a grant from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan. We would like to express our gratitude to Kanagawa Prefecture for providing us with the data, as well as our heartful respect to LINE Corporation, which develops and maintains the prefectural support program, and Amazon Web Services, Inc. which provides the prefecture with a data storage. Funding Information: Hiroaki Miyata reports a grant from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan, and consultation fees from Kanagawa Prefecture, outside the submitted work. All other authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 The Authors",
year = "2020",
month = sep,
doi = "10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113067",
language = "English",
volume = "291",
journal = "Psychiatry Research",
issn = "0165-1781",
publisher = "Elsevier Ireland Ltd",
}
