Advances in Medical, Dental and Health Sciences Vol. 3 ● Issue 2 ● Apr-Jun 2020 ● www.amdhs.org 31 AMDHS ADVANCES IN MEDICAL, DENTAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES SHORT COMMUNICATION OPEN ACCESS e-ISSN: 2581-8538 KM Amran Hossain 1, *, Susmita Roy 2 , Mohammad Mosayed Ullah 3 , Russell Kabir 4 , SM Yasir Arafat 5 1 Department of Physiotherapy, Bangladesh Health Professions Institute, Dhaka, BANGLADESH. 2 Department of Psychiatry, Jalalabad Ragib Rabeya Medical College, Sylhet, BANGLADESH. 3 Department of Occupational Therapy, School of Allied Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA. 4 School of Allied Health, Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK. 5 Department of Psychiatry, Enam Medical College and Hospital, Dhaka, BANGLADESH. COVID-19 and Mental Health Challenges in Bangladesh ACCESS THIS ARTICLE ONLINE WWW.AMDHS.ORG DOI : 10.5530/amdhs.2020.2.8 Received: 02 April 2020; Accepted: 27 June 2020 *Correspondence to: Dr. Russell Kabir Senior Lecturer, School of Allied Health, Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK. Email: russell.kabir@anglia.ac.uk Copyright: © the author(s), publisher and licensee OZZIE Publishers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License Abstract Bangladesh is expected to face a rapid upraise of SARS- CoV-2 outbreak and the nation is in a state of locked down. Evidences suggests a nation suffers a wide range of mental health issues related to anxiety, fear, isolation, depression, panic, emotional outburst and sleep disturbances during COVID 19 pandemic. The psychological impairments are significant to the diagnosed cases, suspected cases, quarantine cases, health workers and their families and relatives. But the health individual spending times with an experience of pandemic are also vulnerable for mental health crisis. There are structured approaches and strategies for the management of this crisis that needs to be taken into account for a comprehensive strategy to meet the spreading challenge in the next potential horizon of COVID 19. Key words: COVID-19, Bangladesh, Mental Health, Challenges, Pandemic. Published by : OZZIE PUBLISHERS INTRODUCTION The COVID 19 is now a global pandemic and World health organization (WHO) notifed South East Asian countries to take effective measures. [1] However, countries (like Bangladesh) with a poorly structured health sector and a high population density are struggling to cope the challenges. This paper aimed to highlight the mental health challenges among the people of Bangladesh as well as possible strategies to cope it. Bangladesh context Bangladesh is still in the regime of accessing the actual number by expanding diagnostic facilities. The country is suspected to spread the disease by the home-returned people from Italy. The BBC reports [2] reports half million people travelled Bangladesh from abroad in the early March, only 10% of them traced to ensure quarantine; as a consequence movement restriction called in the last week of the month. BBC also reports, fear of contagion is affecting our behavior and psychological habilitation tending to express ourselves in an abnormal approach. Psychological reactions of Bangladesh towards COVID 19 pandemic is thriving in propagation to the population with a fear, anxiety, sleeping disturbances, contralateral guilt to one another, depression and suicidal thought that is predicted as per the situations experienced in the raising period. In the rapid raise period, more than one-third of people in China had generalized anxiety disorders, 18% of the people suffered from a depressive illness and similar persons had poor sleep quality. And the majority of them were younger age less than 35 years. [3] This is predicted that the more people learn and think about the disease, the more they are affecting with