Mental Health Services during the COVID-19

Since the beginning of 2020, the entire world population has faced the spread of COVID-19, a highly infectious disease that declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization soon after its emergence.

Health services had to rapidly reorganize themselves: hospitals converted many of their departments to acute and subacute intensive care units and, in most cases, were forced to interrupt the majority of their outpatient services. Concurrently, governments worldwide ordered strict social distancing measures to try to contain the outbreak, whose psychological impact has already been widely reported in the general population, in healthcare workers, and in patients with pre-existing psychiatric conditions.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather knowledge regarding how mental health services around the world have coped with the COVID-19 reality: new research papers, reviews, case reports, brief reports, and commentaries are all welcome. Examples of topics that may be addressed in this Special Issue are:

• Reorganization of psychiatric wards within the hospitals;
• Reorganization of all closed units (e.g., recovery communities and prisons, for children and adults) in order to avoid outbreaks, including teaching exceptional hygiene measures, managing visits from the outside, providing psychological support to users who have been prevented from physically seeing family and friends, etc.;
• Effectiveness of telemedicine, online psychological interviews, and psychotherapy for both psychiatric patients and healthy individuals in need of psychological support.

Dr. Benedetta Demartini
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• COVID-19
• mental health
• mental health services
• Psychiatry Department
• psychosocial services
• telemedicine
• online psychotherapy