DOI: 10.36347/sasjm.2022.v08i06.006

Pages: 403-408

Introduction: Discovered in December 2019, COVID has affected the entire planet, through direct exposure to its virus; SARS-COV-2, or indirectly through the media, Indeed, on January 20, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 "a public health emergency of international concern." Along with other public health crises and collective traumas (terrorism, H1N1 epidemic or SARS-COV), exposure to mediated information about this virus causes psychiatric disorders, including anxiety and lack of well-being. Objective: To link exposure to information about this pandemic through social networks to anxiety and lack of well-being. Methodology: The use of a questionnaire composed of three items, status and individual conditions, the GAD-7 scale for anxiety and the WHO 5-item well-being index (WHO-5). This questionnaire is dedicated to the general population that has not been in direct contact with the virus, but through social networks. Results: We were able to collect 209 participants, they were mainly women with an average age of 28 years, 17.7% had a psychiatric history of anxiety and depression, the median use of social media was 5.7 hours per day. And they were mainly getting their information about the pandemic from Instagram, Facebook, the Moroccan Ministry of Health website, and electronic newspapers. 31.1% of our participants were anxious female gender and history of mood disorder favored this disorder. Increasing age in years decreased the risk of depression in our study. We found a strong negative correlation between anxiety and well-being (p<0.001), and a moderate negative correlation between duration of exposure to social networks and well-being (p<0.001).