Study: 57.8% of healthcare professionals suffered mental disorders during COVID-19 first wave A study on 149 healthcare professionals in Spain and Mexico reveals that, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, 57.8% of them suffered from mental disorders such as anxiety, acute stress and depression. This is stated in the doctoral thesis of Iván Echeverria, a doctoral student at CEU Cardenal Herrera University, whose research has just been published in the scientific journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The results indicate that the moral courage shown by healthcare professionals to face the first wave was one of the factors that increased the risk of suffering from mental illness.