**Question 1: what are the COVID-19-related mental health theories?**

According to WHO [9], mental health is a state of well-being during which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, has the capacity to cope with the normal stresses of life, works productively and fruitfully, and makes meaningful contributions to his or her community. In other words, mental health is not just the absence of mental illness, but the presence of well-being. Cohan and Cole [10] and Ilesanmi and Eboiyehi [11] asserted that disasters have complex, multi-faceted, and long-lasting mental health implications for the people who experience them and vicarious trauma effects on their caregivers. Maths, Nirmala, Moirangthem, and Kumar [12] reported that the prevalence of mental health problems in populations affected by disasters was two to three times higher than that of the general population.

*A Scoping Analysis of the Psychosocial and Health Implications of COVID-19… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104546*

Sturgeon [13] posits that the determinants of mental health and well-being during the pandemic are both psychological and social factors. The psychological factors encompass emotions (e.g., anger, guilt, and grief), thought processes (e.g., hopelessnesses, helplessness associated with the pandemic), beliefs (e.g., about the outbreak, its attribution, and those affected by it), and so on. The social factors entail access to family and community networks during the COVID-19 quarantine, economic factors, stigma and discrimination, cultural practices, and so on. Both psychological and social factors interact with each other to influence the mental health and well-being of individuals during the pandemic.

Consequently, the general theoretical mental health assumption related to COVID-19 and its associated comorbidities as well as the containment measures (quarantine) is that undue distress, a sense of loss, and impairment to social and occupational functioning can stem from losing direct social contacts, loved ones, employment, sources of income, educational opportunities, recreation, freedoms, and social supports. This can be worsened by the gripping fears and anxieties of its morbidity, mortality, and efficacy of high transmission. These anxieties include constant fears of getting infected and passing the infection to friends, families, and coworkers, as well as fear of survival when infected. The development of this mental stress is an emergency needing mental health response. Nearly 20 months into the global health crisis, the pandemic fatigue worsened by the resurgence of more deadly variants is contributing to and creating risks of mental distress of losing jobs, keeping families safe, or the sweeping uncertainty of the future.

Gallagher and Wetherell [14] classified the mental health implications of COVID-19 and its associated comorbidities as peritraumatic stress occurring during or immediately following infection. Biello [15] highlighted the following characteristics of pre-trauma in the current global pandemic scenario as including:

