Loneliness, COVID-19 media coverage, and teen mental health

Key Point:

• Teens can be vulnerable to particularly intense and complex situations sorrow Caused by Coronavirus Pandemic.
• Teens are more likely to have a harder time than adults depression, anxiety,and suicide Ideas during a pandemic, new research suggests.
• Lonely Increased consumption of COVID-19-related media was both associated with an increased risk of teenage mental health problems.

I recently talked to a teenager who lost his family to a coronavirus illness. Almost a year after her grandmother died, she struggles to allow her strong sense of sadness to diminish naturally over time.

She showed me that part of the reason she continued to feel overwhelming sadness was due to the frequency of reminders about her grandmother’s cause of death. Nowadays, you can’t turn on your TV or scroll through social media without remembering wearing masks, social distance, hand washing, and capacity restrictions.

The purpose of this article is not to criticize these measures. However, I have found myself assuming that the nearly ubiquitous reminders of illness and death will not be able to help my clients heal after my grandmother’s death. And because the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed so many lives, she isn’t just experiencing the difficulties of her loss and complex sorrow.

How do teens react to COVID-19?

The reason why other adolescents must have similar experiences stress COVID-19’s pandemic-responsive sadness and I turned to research literature to see if quantitative information was available about the psychological consequences of experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime social culture. .. trauma At such a young age.

Indeed, a recently published (January 2021) national study [4] The proportion of adolescents (n = 583) and adults (n = 4,326) confirms that 55% of those who have lost their loved ones with COVID-19 have “severe sadness.” In addition, the authors showed that on average all respondents struggled to cope with the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, but adolescents had significantly more depression, anxiety, and PTSD Symptoms, and suicidal ideation and behavior are superior to adult counterparts. In fact, 55% of adolescent participants supported the same depressive symptoms as major depressive disorder.This seems to be a significant increase from the 2017 estimate, which found that only 13 percent of adolescents meet the criteria for major depressive episodes. [1]..

The negative effects of loneliness on teenage mental health

In adolescence, depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms were predicted due to loneliness, stress, poor health, and poor sleep quality. In addition, the number of hours spent using social media correlated with depression and anxiety symptoms.This is potentially not surprising given previous studies suggesting a link between the use of social media and the reported symptoms of depression. [2]..

However, Murata et al. [4] I had something to worry about. For adolescents, both loneliness and exposure to media coverage of COVID-19 were associated with depression and suicidal ideation and a higher risk of behavior. In total, 37% of adolescents experienced suicidal ideation and 1.7% attempted suicide since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is sad statistics.

Overall, the authors found that loneliness was the most statistically powerful predictor of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. And previous studies of teens have shown that the duration of loneliness is more painful than the intensity of loneliness. [3]The negative effects of blockade and social distance can increase over the course of each day.

What can i do?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to minimize the loss of life and socio-economic impact of a pandemic.However, evidence suggests that children suffer more psychologically than adults and do so statistically. [4]..Advocates, parents, therapists, and policy makers should begin to seriously consider what steps should be taken to minimize the catastrophic and unintended consequences of measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. Is the opinion of this author childhood mental health. Hopefully more research will continue to be published that will provide specific recommendations to help our young people manage this unprecedented crisis.