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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the psychological burden on young people around the world and may have disproportionately large impacts for young people with disabilities. This review aims to systematically review the quantitative evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of young people with disabilities and evaluate the quality of included studies. Methods: A systematic search was conducted using 5 electronic databases. The quality of the studies was assessed using the SIGN risk of bias assessment tool. A narrative synthesis was performed to synthesize the results of included studies. Results: The initial search yielded 1935 studies, of which two met the eligibility criteria, one longitudinal study and one cross-sectional study, both assessed to be of low quality. In the cross-sectional study, young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities self-reported an increase in mental health symptoms. The longitudinal study found no evidence of a change in mental health symptoms from pre-pandemic to during the pandemic among young people with autism spectrum disorder, although these individuals reported negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on their emotional or mental health. Conclusions: The findings of this review provide some weak evidence of a negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of young people with disabilities. Importantly, the findings highlight the lack of research in this area. More research is needed to investigate the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of young disabled people, in order for governments to develop emergency preparedness plans to safeguard the well-being of this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to adequate, safe, secure, accessible and affordable housing is a fundamental human right and one stipulated in the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Australian adults with disabilities experience housing disadvantage including homelessness, poor-quality housing and housing unaffordability; however, we lack a comprehensive comparison of the housing circumstances of people with and without disabilities and differences by impairment type. We analysed data from a nationally representative sample of 11,394 working-aged Australians collected in 2011. We found that people with disabilities experienced disadvantage across all housing indicators, and people with intellectual and psychological disabilities fared worst. These findings suggest that there is a housing crisis for Australians with disabilities, which may intensify with the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. There is a need to develop long-term housing solutions that promote independence, are accessible and affordable, and that consider location and neighbourhood context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Disability acquisition in adulthood is associated with deterioration in mental health. Social support may act as a "buffer" against poor mental health following disability acquisition. We tested the hypothesis that women and men with low social support experienced larger declines in mental health on acquisition of a disability compared to women and men with high social support.Methods: We assessed whether social support, measured both prior and subsequent to disability acquisition, modified the association between disability acquisition and mental health using 14 annual waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. Participants reported at least two consecutive waves of disability preceded by at least two consecutive waves without disability (2200 participants, 15,724 observations). Fixed-effects linear regression models were used to estimate average differences in mental health between waves with and without disability, for women and men separately. We tested for effect measure modification of the association by social support, including a three-way interaction between disability and social support prior and subsequent to disability acquisition.Results: Though the effects of disability acquisition on mental health were much larger for women, for both women and men there was a consistent pattern of association with social support. There was evidence that social support modified the association between disability acquisition and mental health, with the largest effects for those experiencing a change from high to low social support subsequent to disability and for people with consistently low social support.Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of developing new policy and practice strategies to improve the mental health of people with disabilities, including interventions to promote social support at the time of disability acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]