Revealing the impact of COVID-19 on mental health through machine learning

The significant decline in the performance of pre-pandemic models on COVID-19 data reveals the profound impact of the pandemic on mental health, highlighting the need for new predictive models tailored to crisis circumstances. The built RF model, uses appropriate pandemic data, performed accurately during the COVID-19 era with an accuracy of 98.1%. XAI techniques confirmed that factors such as delayed medical care, family poverty, job loss, and reduced social involvement were critical drivers that impacted the decline in mental health during the pandemic.