The Northern Agenda: Flu outbreak killing seabirds in their thousands

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By ROB PARSONS - July 25 2022

Since March 2020 it's been two years where the nation has been plagued by uncertainty, with millions isolated from their friends and family thanks to the pandemic and services much harder to access.

But a new report has revealed that while mental health throughout England has been hit hard during the Covid-19 pandemic, the North both fared worse than elsewhere and has since recovered more slowly.

And according to the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) , the so-called 'parallel pandemic' of mental ill health in the North has cost the country a total of £2bn. Now officials are calling for central government to increase NHS and local authority funding for mental health provision in the North and provide more resources to deal with health inequalities.

Among the findings are that people in the North aged under 35 were more likely to have developed a psychiatric disorder over the course of the pandemic, an increase of 2.5% compared to a reduction of 1.3% in the rest of England.

Anti-depressant prescriptions rose by 12% in the North during the pandemic, while women from ethnic minorities in the North had the worst mental health in the country, as Sam Volpe reports for ChronicleLive .

Their mental health scores fell by 10% at the start of the pandemic and were 4% lower throughout the pandemic. Mental health fell equally in the North and the rest of the country during the pandemic (a 5% decrease), but recovered more quickly in the rest of