Like many other young people, Amelie believes the Covid-19 pandemic – and its series of shutdowns and restrictions – has marked a “turning point” for her mental health. “I came face to face with everything I had suppressed – and it caused a huge depression,” the French university student, who was 19 when the 2020 pandemic broke out, told AFP.
The pandemic and mental health
Five years later, Amelie is still receiving mental health treatment. She did not want to give her last name, fearing it might affect her future employment. But she is far from alone in still struggling with the lingering psychological effects of the Covid era. Young people forced to isolate themselves during one of the most social times of their lives have taken the biggest hit to their mental health during the pandemic, research has shown.
In France, a fifth of 18-24-year-olds will experience an episode of depression in 2021, according to a survey conducted by the country’s health agency. In the United States that same year, 37 percent of high school students reported poor mental health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And a recent study of more than 700,000 Finnish teenagers, published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, had similar results. “The proportion of participants with symptoms of generalized anxiety, depression and social anxiety … increased from pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels by 2021 and remained at these higher levels in 2023,” it said.
“Long Tail of Calls”
The consequences of the pandemic are also felt by the next generations. Some children who only started school five years ago experienced problems with learning and emotional development. A 2023 review of about 40 studies in 15 countries, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found that children still had not caught up with significant learning delays.
“This is a real generational problem,” said study lead author Bastian Bethhauser. These problems seem to continue even after the Covid years. Britain has seen unprecedented levels of absenteeism in the 2023/2024 school year, according to the country’s education agency Ofsted, which complained that a post-pandemic “change in attitudes” meant attendance was now “viewed more casually”.
Simon Kidwell, headteacher at Hartford Manor Primary School in Cheshire, north-west England, said the pandemic had created a “long tail of problems”. “Academically, we caught up pretty quickly,” he told AFP. However, “we’ve seen a huge spike in children needing mental health services,” he added.
Impact of the pandemic on children
There has also been a “huge increase” in the number of children with special educational needs or children who need extra support for behavioral problems, Kidwell said. Once they start school, younger children also have more speech and language problems, he added.
Some young students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have responded differently to school activities. Selina Warlow, a psychologist who works with children with these disorders at a clinic in Farnham, near London, said that “a lot of autistic children liked being in private.”
“The school environment is really overwhelming. Loud. Busy. Being in a classroom with 30 other kids is really hard for them,” she told AFP. Now some may ask, “why bring me back into this?” she said, noting that it was difficult for other students with these disabilities to lose the structure and routine of the school day. The pandemic has also meant that many young children have not “received the early support they need”, she added. “Intervening in those very early years can have a huge impact on a child.”
