COVID-19 and mental health services in Europe

The area of mental health is directly affected by the pandemic and its consequences, for various reasons: 1. the pandemic triggered a global lockdown, with dramatic socioeconomic and therefore psychosocial implications; 2. mental health services, which treat by definition a fragile population from the psychological, biological and social points of view, have a complex organizational frame, and it was expected that this would be affected (or overwhelmed) by the pandemic; 3. mental health services should, at least in theory, be able to help guide public health policies when these involve a significant modification of individual behaviour. It was conducted a narrative review of the publications produced by European researchers in the period February-June 2020 and indexed in PubMed. A total of 34 papers were analyzed, which document the profound clinical, organizational and procedural changes introduced in mental health services following this exceptional and largely unforeseen planetary event. Among the main innovations recorded everywhere, the strong push towards the use of telemedicine techniques should be mentioned: however, these require an adequate critical evaluation, which highlights their possibilities, limits, advantages and disadvantages instead of simple triumphalist judgments. Furthermore, should be emphasized the scarcity of quantitative studies conducted in this period and the absence of studies aimed, for example, at exploring the consequences of prolonged and forced face-to-face contact between patients and family members with a high index of "expressed emotions".