Self-assessment of physical health, perceived threat from COVID-19 and mental resilience among people diagnosed and undiagnosed with mental disorders

Data was collected from 11 November 2020 to 03 April 2021 in Bulgaria both online and offline. The participants in the study were 268 divided into four groups equal in number (N = 67) – mentally ill people diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorders who were pensioners because of their disease or unemployed; students and workers in the area of healthcare; students and workers in other occupational fields such as economy, education, law, and information technologies (IT); and athletes who practiced sport more than once per week. In total, 201 subjects (75%) in good mental health, undiagnosed with a mental disease were compared with 67 mentally ill subjects (25%) diagnosed with schizophrenia (N = 50) or bipolar disorders (N = 17).
The participants self-assessed their physical health on a scale from 0 (very poor) to 10 (very good).
The participants self-assessed the perceived threat from COVID-19 by means of a questionnaire comprising of five dichotomous items whose score ranged from 0 to 5 - as perceived threat for themselves, their relatives, their familiar acquaintances, unfamiliar citizens of the country, and foreigners.
Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale - CD-RISC2 (Vaishnavi et al., 2007) was applied for measuring mental resilience. CD-RISC2 is a copyright -protected instrument and its items are presented only with their numbers, not with their content. The answers on both items from CD-RISC 2 were given on a 5-point scale from 0-not true at all, to 4 - true nearly all the time.
Data were statistically processed by means of software JASP 0.14 (JASP Team, 2020).

Acknowledgments
The authors thank Prof. Jonathan Davidson for permitting to use The Connor-Davidson Resilience scale (CD-RISC2).
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References
JASP Team. (2020). JASP (Version 0.14) [Computer software]. https://jasp-stats.org/faq/
Vaishnavi, S., Connor, K., & Davidson, J. R. (2007). An abbreviated version of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), the CD-RISC2: Psychometric properties and applications in psychopharmacological trials. Psychiatry Research, 152(2-3), 293–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2007.01.006