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Working Women’s Mental Health Status of Bangladesh During COVID-19 Pandemic: An Online Based Survey

Indrani Sarker, Nahid Salma, Sumaiya Shafayet Supti, Sauda Mubarak, Farhana Afrin Duti, Md. Asraful Alam, Mizanur Rahman Zihad

Abstract


Background: To lessen community transmission and to conquer COVID-19, “lockdown” and “work from home” are extremely worldwide strategy. Though these are remarkably effective but for working women it is burdensome as alongside, they need to do domestic work. This disturbs their mental health and therefore the study aimed to assess the mental health condition of working women of Bangladesh during COVID-19. Subject and Methods: Data was collected from 248 working women of Bangladesh through questionnaire following purposive sampling technique. To check the reliability and consistency of study variables, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used. Ordinal regression was performed to find out the association between all the predictor variables. Results: The results show, 27.8% of working women were severe to extremely severe depressed, 36.7% were severe to extremely severe anxious and 17.7% were severe to extremely severe stressed. Besides, fear of getting infected, family members being affected, waking up seeing bad dreams, feeling double pressure handling both family and office had higher scores. Whereas, having fair knowledge about COVID-19, using masks or gloves, taking nutritious food and doing physical exercise were effective for DASS-21 scores. Conclusions: Study shows, large percentage of working women of Bangladesh are suffering from mental health problem. Authors believe, regular physical exercises, taking proper nutrition, not taking extra pressure will help to overcome their mental disturbances. The study also suggests, the government should set some comfortable rules in favor of them, and their family member should support them to uplift their mental health condition.


Keywords


COVID-19, DASS-21, Lockdown, Social distance, Mental Health

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References


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