Like many other young people, Amelie believes that the Covid-19 pandemic – and the succession of lockdowns and restrictions – 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 years old when the pandemic broke out in 2020, told AFP.
Five years later, Amelie is still receiving treatment for her mental health. She did not want to give her last name for fear it could affect future job openings.
But she is far from the only one still struggling with the lasting psychological effects of the Covid era.
Research has found that younger people, who were forced into isolation during one of the most social times of their lives, took the biggest hit to their mental health during the pandemic.
In France, a fifth of 18-24 year olds experienced an episode of depression in 2021, according to a survey by the country’s public health agency.
In the United States, 37 percent of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health in the same year, 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, yielded similar findings.
“The proportion of participants with symptoms of generalized anxiety, depression and social anxiety… increased from pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels through 2021 and remained at these higher levels in 2023,” the report said.
– ‘Long tail of challenges’ –
The consequences of the pandemic are also being felt by the next generation.
Some children who just started school five years ago have experienced problems with learning and emotional development.
A 2023 review of about 40 studies from 15 countries published in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that children had still not caught up to significant delays in their learning.
“It’s a real generational problem,” says the study’s lead author, Bastian Betthauser.
These problems appear to continue well beyond the Covid years.
Britain saw unprecedented levels of school absenteeism in the 2023/2024 academic year, according to the country’s education body Ofsted, which lamented that a post-pandemic ‘change in attitudes’ meant school attendance is now ‘viewed more casually’ .
Simon Kidwell, headteacher at Hartford Manor primary school in Cheshire, north-west England, said the pandemic had presented a “long series of challenges”.
“Academically, we caught up quite quickly,” he told AFP.
“However, we have seen a huge spike in the number of children needing access to mental health care,” he added.
There has also been a “huge increase” in the number of children with special educational needs or who need extra support for behavioral problems, Kidwell said.
Once they started school, younger children also had more problems with speech and language, he added.
Some young students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have had a different response to the time off.
Selina Warlow, a psychologist who works with children suffering from the disorders at a clinic in Farnham, near London, said that “many autistic children have loved being in lockdown”.
“The school environment is really overwhelming. It’s loud. It’s busy. It’s very difficult for them to be in a class with 30 other children,” she told AFP.
Some may wonder, “Why would I put myself back into that?” she said, highlighting that other students with these disorders found it difficult to lose the structure and routine of school.
The pandemic also meant that many young children were “not getting the early support they needed”, she added.
“Intervening in those very early years can have a huge impact on the child.”
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