The panic–sadness bridge: a longitudinal study using undirected and directed network analyses of COVID-19-related anxiety and depression
Jiamin Bao, Yuxuan Wang, Yixuan Wang, Qiang Chen, Yinyin Zang · 2025
Read The panic–sadness bridge: a longitudinal study using undirected and directed network analyses of COVID-19-related anxiety and depression by Jiamin Bao, Yuxuan Wang, Yixuan Wang, Qiang Chen, Yinyin Zang (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12849126.txt.
Description
Jiamin Bao and four co-authors follow anxiety and depression symptoms across the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, hunting for the bridge where one condition feeds the other, in this 2025 study. Earlier work mapped the two symptom networks in single snapshots. Snapshots cannot show who pulls whom.
Five hundred and thirty-three Chinese adults completed a standard hospital questionnaire twice, three months apart: once during the outbreak in early 2020, once after the peak. Three network methods, each adding direction or time, were applied to the same data. The symptom web stayed stable overall, but one link stood out: feelings of panic and sadness reinforced each other directly, forming the main bridge between the anxiety cluster and the depression cluster. For clinicians, a bridge symptom is a high-value target, since treating it may keep one disorder from igniting the other.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jiamin Bao, Yuxuan Wang, Yixuan Wang, Qiang Chen, Yinyin Zang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 52 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |