In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety and depression rates are spiking in the LGBTQ+ community, especially in individuals who hadn’t struggled with those issues in the past, say researchers. “What I was hearing at the beginning of the pandemic was that people who were already anxious were more anxious than ever, and we didn’t find that,” said researcher Annesa Flentje, an assistant professor in the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing, in a university press release. “In looking at averages across the LGBTQ+ population, we found the greatest changes in anxiety were among people who weren’t anxious prior to the pandemic.”