“If they did group counselling or something, and one person just said how they feel, everyone might start opening up.”Īway from the outrage about teenagers throwing house parties, this is the reality of life during the pandemic for many young people. It has robbed them of milestones and rites of passage: birthday parties, summer trips away, first jobs, nights out, the debs, the Leaving Certificate and now the college experience. It has made socialising difficult, even at school, where their interactions with one another are curtailed by two-metre rules and masks. It has forced them into spending more time at home with their families when everything in their psyche is pushing them to be more independent. But for many, it has been a challenging time.
“It’s been completely surreal, and not a good way. We’re all trying our best,” says 17-year-old Aoife Devlin from Sligo, who is in sixth year. “We have missed out on quite a few rites of passage. There’s the exam pressure, the lack of team sports – I play Gaelic, and that’s gone. We need to have some kind of positive in our lives, because not having anything to look forward to is what’s causing the damage.” And then to have that constant narrative that it’s us that is the problem, that’s really, really hard. When countries around the globe embarked on lockdowns to try to flatten the curve of Covid-19 in March, there was no way of calculating the long-term effects on anyone – particularly on the youngest citizens whose lives and education were put on hold to curtail the spread of a virus that has predominantly affected those much older. Now, international data is beginning to emerge to show that the burden on young people’s mental health and their overall sense of wellbeing has been significant. One of the earliest studies was carried out among 1,100 students in Hubei province between February and March this year, and recently published in JAMA Pediatrics.
Over one in five students had symptoms of depression 19 per cent had anxiety. The UK Household Longitudinal Study, involving over 17,000 participants, found one in four 16- to 25-year-olds had “significant levels of mental distress”. A study in Australia by Unicef found that the proportion of 13- to 17-year-olds “coping well” with life collapsed from 81 per cent to 45 per cent between January and April.
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