Comparison of the psychosocial burden of patients at the beginning of psychosomatic rehabilitation before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic – A multicentric cohort study of routine data

Background: The study objective is to analyze the influence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on the psychosocial burden of people suffering from mental illness at the beginning of in-patient rehabilitation treatment in Germany Methods: . Psychosocial stress at the beginning of rehabilitation of patient cohorts before or during the pandemic was compared using multivariate variance analyses (MANOVA) and univariate non-parametric Mann-Whitney-U-tests. The study refers to the data of patients from seven psychosomatic rehabilitation clinics of Celenus-Kliniken GmbH. Results: . Based on the sampling of 7335 patients, statistically significant greater stress with a low effect size ( η² p = .005) of the cohort affected by the pandemic was observed. Conclusions: . People who started rehabilitation during the pandemic only demonstrated slightly greater psychosocial stress at the beginning of therapy.