COVID And Young People: The Future of Mental Health For All of Us

Solving this problem — the way modern life interacts negatively with our psyches — is a defining task of our era.

During my 30-year career practicing and teaching psychiatry, there has never been anything like COVID to stress test the emotional vulnerability of our society.

I have written two articles about the mental health fallout of the pandemic (to be clear, I mean life during the pandemic, not specific things like having COVID itself or losing someone to COVID): one at the very beginning looking at what may be coming, and one almost a year later, which took a look at how things were going.

The most significant finding in the second article was that initial research showed young people, from school age through college, were by far taking the brunt of the psychological effects. Since then much more research has been done on the mental health effects of the pandemic. The results are largely the same.

One study, which looked at 29 other reports from all over the globe and included over 80,000 young people, found a doubling in rates of already accelerating anxiety and depression (roughly, during the pandemic, the rate of clinical levels of depression and/or anxiety increased from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 young people). These are much higher than changes in the rest of the population. As I noted above, this is in the context of rates of problematic symptoms that were already known to be rising since at least the year 2000.

Scientists have given thought to possible explanations for these COVID era increases in symptoms. Some possibilities included: children and adolescents were lonely, away from their normal routines and its supports (teachers, coaches), and had missed milestones like proms and graduations. As time went on their home lives may have become disturbed due to financial or other COVID related issues.

However, I think It’s fair to say that most adults had their own versions of this scenario, many working from home just like the students. In addition, adults have other concerns like money, jobs, children, the health of the family, and the future. Given this comparison, it does not seem to me that a difference in stressors, by itself, explains the large gap between young people and adults in their responses to the pandemic.

There must be another differentiating factor between these two groups. What I propose is that we can look at the lives of young people during the pandemic as small, but intense versions of modern life. Most notably, they are cut off from others and highly dependent upon technology. The intensity of their social lives and fondness for technology, coupled with their lack of responsibility for things outside their world (such as children, jobs, and finances) make for a pandemic-induced life inside a bubble of modernity for young people.

So, it may seem like we have found a difference between young and adult populations to account for the different findings. But how exactly, does this explain things? It seems like adults’ lives are more stressful than the modern life bubble of the young.

The answer lies in the exceedingly modern types of lives that the pandemic has made for the young.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this situation by looking at one part of the experience of school-age children: video conferencing. In addition to their previous use of these remarkable apps to chat with friends, they now have to use them for school virtually all day.

Experts have noted that spending a lot of time on video apps like Zoom can be very taxing. In normal life we need to be able to see someone clearly, see all their nonverbal facial movements, as well as their body language in order to fully understand them. With video chat apps we have distortions and delays; unnatural camera angles, lighting and sound; and the distraction of seeing yourself constantly in the corner. There is much more to this than we know, but nonetheless, it is quite unnatural and mentally taxing to maintain.

To broaden this picture, young people are being forced into an intensified version of modern life with near-total isolation and most relationships existing only over video apps. The part of the brain that must maintain the artificial world that these young people are constructing in their minds from video and audio input is the prefrontal cortex (PFC); the same area that, when overly stressed can release any propensity to mental illness.

What we’re seeing in these high rates of anxiety and depression in young people is actually a continuation of something that has been happening for decades. Adults are indeed exposed to the same stressors, including the stress on the PFC; and we are in fact seeing climbing rates and severity of mental illness in adults. But in humans the PFC does not fully develop until the late twenties. This gives adults an advantage of a mature PFC in managing the intensified modern stress of the pandemic.

What the COVID pandemic is doing, aside from its devastating death rate and long list of health and social problems, is to exacerbate what we have all been living through our entire lives: too much isolation, a technology-based culture, and its effects on our brains. The result, plain and simple, is more mental illness and less psychological well-being, especially for the young.

Solving this problem — the way modern life interacts negatively with our psyches — is a defining task of our era. It will also be one of the chronic problems of COVID, especially for the young people of our culture.