When it's over...is it really over? Adolescent mental health after COVID

For the rest of our lives we’ll be swapping stories about how obsessed we got with sourdough bread, or marveling that we didn’t see our best friend in-person for more than a year. The daily reality of the COVID lockdown appears absurd and remote through the lens of how normal things feel in the busy cafe or laughing dinner party we swap these stories in. But like a monster at the end of a horror movie, we know it’s not really dead, and as the research starts to coagulate around the lasting social impacts of the pandemic, we get a glimpse of zombie hands thrusting up through the earth, tentacles writhing around the corner. And like the most feared monsters, it comes for our kids.

I named this post after a mediocre early 2000s hit.

Even as we faced the immediate problems of lockdown we knew there would be more to come. Fears and whispers were flying about increased suicide rates, overdoses, and violence as a result of the COVID pandemic. But while many of those indicators of public mental health seem to have settled back to pre-pandemic levels, mental health issues for kids and teens remain strikingly elevated. Although it bears mentioning that mental health indicators for kids and teens had been worsening before the pandemic, the lockdown seems to have accelerated the trend.

In March of 2022 the Center for DIsease Control published a swath of data on the COVID-19 pandemic’s mental health impacts on youth, including the finding that 44% of high school students had acknowledged having felt “persistently sad and hopeless”, and 20% had seriously considered suicide in the previous year.

Twenty percent. Is that hard to read? It is for me. These are kids whose entire year and then some was spent in a listless arrhythmia when they should have been making friends, falling in love, and learning how to clean up the messes when things didn’t go quite right with either. Instead, for this generation we have to wonder if something ugly has been internalized about calamity, suffering, and isolation instead.

Other statistics in the same report help assemble the diagnosis. A full 53% of the adolescents who stated they did not feel “cared for, supported, and belonging at school” expressed feeling profound sadness and hopelessness; compared with 35% of those who felt they could rely on their school community.  These same more connected young people were much less likely to seriously consider suicide (14% vs. 26%) or actually attempt suicide (6% vs. 12%) than their more alienated peers. Ultimately only 47% of youth did report feeling this sense of community and connection. 

What we can infer from the above statistical narrative is, a sense of connection buffers young people from experiencing prolonged, damaging despair. Yet it is precisely this key ingredient that is missing from most high school environments according to my teenage clients. The fragmentation of many high schools as a place of community is even more critical when we reflect that for most adolescents, with families dislocated from extended kinship networks and disengaged from place-based ties like neighborhood relationships or civic involvement, school is the only community that even offers itself as a candidate.

Maybe, just maybe, it is misguided to assume that a cohort of lockdown-traumatized and developmentally overwhelmed adolescents can consistently offer healthy relationships to each other. And the truth is, we as a culture and as individual adults don’t try very hard to make high schools into places that foster connection. Our responsibility to young people goes beyond plunking them down in a mob of other kids the same age and telling them to be friends, and get good grades while they’re at it. 

Johann Hari’s conception of nine causes of depression and anxiety.

Adults might have an even greater role to play in helping adolescents connect to other spheres of meaning, beyond their social worlds. In his 2018 book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Surprising Solutions the writer Johann Hari enumerates a total of nine spheres of disconnection that contribute to depression. While relationships can be a source of deep ballast in an adolescent’s life, other arenas that Hari addresses including meaningful work, a sense of a hopeful future, creative expression, and the natural world, might be a better fit for some kids and also offer alternatives when relationships are under strain.

Throughout the pandemic, we repeated “kids are resilient” as a mantra. But as the data rolls in we have to acknowledge that there may have been a desperate note in the phrase. We as adults need to offer something of value to connect with if we want our kids to be healthy and happy. We do this by offering ourselves thoughtfully and authentically in relationship, by encouraging them to form supportive communities, and by looking for ways that young people can take up something important to themselves. While the pandemic’s lingering effects pose new challenges, they also light a way forward for a generation and a society if we want to make it right.