Searches for stress and therapy spiked as people grappled with loneliness and the uncertainties around life and work. Job searches have also surged How have Indians been coping with the lockdown over the past few weeks?
Are they more anxious than peers elsewhere? Are they more or less worried about jobs? To find answers, we, like most Indians on the net, turned to Google.
Data from Google Trends give a fair sense of what is on top of people’s minds, and are increasingly being used by social scientists to gauge real time trends.
The Google Trends data suggests that stress levels in India skyrocketed during the lockdown, with search levels for stress exceeding that of several other countries which were under lockdown over the past few weeks.