Insomnia during COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown: Prevalence, severity, and associated risk factors in French population

Abstract

In response to Voitsidis et al. (2020) published in Psychiatry Research addressing the paucity of research on insomnia during a pandemic, we obtained data from an online cross-sectional survey by documenting the prevalence of clinical insomnia and its contributing factors in a French general public sample. Participants (N = 556) completed the Insomnia Severity Index, UCLA Loneliness scale, and provided information on sociodemographics, antecedents of mental and physical health conditions, and COVID-19-related stressful life events. In our sample, 19.1% met the diagnostic criteria of clinical insomnia, which was twice lower than that reported in the study by Voitsidis et al., but close to those found among Chinese and Italian populations. We confirmed COVID-19-related worries and loneliness to be the major contributing factors to clinical insomnia, in addition to education status, being infected by the virus and pre-existing mental health illness. These findings underscore that sleep-related problems should be an important component of mental health interventions during pandemics.