Mental health in India metro cities: Longitudinal data

The data used in the study was collected from a randomly selected sample of mobile phone users in the six Class 1 metropolises of India— Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Hyderabad. These cities had seen a high number of active cases (22.30% of all cases), and deaths due to COVID-19 (37.99% of all cases), and the shortage of medical facilities. Respondents were residents of the city, aged between 21 and 60 years—randomly selected from a list of mobile telephone users. The survey was undertaken during the months of August and September 2020 (when the lockdown had ended, but COVID cases and deaths were rising rapidly) and then resurveyed again in July-August 2021 (after the second wave had ended). These periods are referred to as T1 and T2, respectively. Out of the original 1275 respondents, 994 could be contacted again. In the remaining cases, the mobile phones were either switched off or not reachable.

The survey was administered using the abridged shorter version of the DASS questionnaire, DASS-21 (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). The raw scores were used to create z-scores, which were then recoded into five categories (normal, mild, moderate, severe and extremely severe) following the methodology suggested by Lovibond and Lovibond (1995).