A high school senior from California described teen COVID-19 mental fallout in a nutshell:
“It’s not that I’m mad that I missed the events. I wouldn’t have gone to prom anyway. I just feel bad about all the experiences I missed that never had the chance to happen. I wonder what those years would have been like if none of it ever happened.”
A grown adult who has already lived a life and whose days are filled with routines that rarely change may be content with missing some time outdoors during lockdowns. But for teens living in one of the most dynamic periods of their lives, growing up in the time of COVID-19 takes a larger toll, according to mental health professionals looking to make sense of the pandemic’s effect on teens.
Teens have missed college opportunities, their driver’s tests, and countless life-shaping experiences with friends.
This was the longest pause button ever pushed—a purgatory that teenagers used to think only existed in dystopian films. Pandemic countermeasures hurt some more than others, but no one can really say how much.
One thing is for certain, according to Hussong.
“Youth in the United States are reporting that the biggest impact of the pandemic is on their mental health,” she said.
Some mental health practitioners think the COVID-19 mental fallout in certain teens should be labeled as a “full-blown trauma” and be treated as such.
“Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10–24. The pandemic has intensified this crisis: across the country we have witnessed dramatic increases in Emergency Department visits for all mental health emergencies including suspected suicide attempts,” the statement reads.
Psychiatrists say the struggle teens are facing may be greater than many people realize.
“My concerns now are actually worse than they were a year and a half ago. I just saw it as a temporary disaster. We’re now seeing this as an ongoing problem.”
Can the long-term effects of COVID-19 countermeasures be considered a full-blown mental health crisis?
“We’re going to start to see more and more evidence and reports of lingering chronic trauma, injuries, ongoing abuse of children just like now we’re seeing with the speech problems, like we’re seeing with the drug problems, like we’re seeing with the lack of socialization with children—anxiety and depressive disorders—all these problems that we just ignored ... are now coming back and rebounding much, much worse than they were in 2020,” he said.
The review found that 18 to 60 percent of children and adolescents scored above risk thresholds for distress—particularly anxiety and depressive symptoms—and two studies reported greater social media use.
Isolation
There’s no meme in the virtual universe that encompasses the kind of disappointment teens faced when their schools remained closed.“It’s just devastating,” McDonald said. “I have so many children in my practice who are unable to spend time with their friends at sleepovers because they can’t separate from their mothers. I have children who have punched through plate glass windows with their fists at age 8 out of frustration because they can’t go outside.
“I have autistic children who were completely fine psychologically. They have autism, but that doesn’t mean that they’re mentally ill, and these autistic children, by and large, have suffered the most.”
In Washington, back-to-school family surveys found that 60 percent of students lacked the devices and 27 percent lacked the high-speed internet access needed to successfully participate in virtual school.
Excluded
One senior from central California (who wished to remain anonymous) transitioned to homeschooling when his public high school went virtual.“It was boring because there was nothing to do, and my mom took me out of school, so I couldn’t be there with my friends,” he said.
The teen worked more than usual at the local surf shop. He spent more time at the beach.
But when his friends said most teachers weren’t enforcing the masks, his parents tried to re-enroll him in high school, but the school flagged his incomplete vaccine record, which was acceptable in seventh grade, but not in high school.
He said the only thing that would make his life better again is “going back to school,” yet California’s strict school vaccine laws won’t allow him to do so. His mother worries that the damage to his social life may be more than just boredom and stress.
Two Melbourne teens who had lived through six COVID-19 lockdowns in two years said they felt deeply affected by stay-at-home orders, including losing the motivation for homeschooling and overdoing their social media and phone usage.
“I have lots of friends who I’ve seen turn to drugs and alcohol over lockdown. I’ve really seen a change in people. They’ve got nothing,” one teen said. “When we were at school two or so years ago ... that’s what [people would] do for the day; they’d go home and sleep and go to school the next day. When they’re at home all day, it’s not healthy, you know.”
Drugs
McDonald said he’s personally seen an increase in drug use among his clients.“I lost two patients for the first time in my career, “ he said in The Defender interview, choking up.
“Two patients, underaged, due to fentanyl overdoses. One of them took the Fentanyl when he was at home because he couldn’t go to school, because he was under [Los Angeles Mayor] Eric Garcetti’s ‘Safer at Home’ policy. Safer at home and he died, and his parents were right there in the house when he died. They didn’t know he had taken the fentanyl until they found him face down, green, in a pile of his own vomit, not breathing.
Suicide Attempts
Communities were shocked when 15-year-old Stockton, California, teenager Jo'Vianni Smith committed suicide by hanging herself because of what her mother, Danielle Hunt, said were the circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hunt told local station KTXL that her daughter showed no signs of wanting to take her life, but may have had difficulty dealing with the state’s stay-at-home order, which had only been in place for a few weeks into the U.S. lockdowns.“During February 21 [to] March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7 percent,” The report reads.
“Because I’m in this field, I know these tragedies were happening before, and I don’t mean to minimize it, but it wasn’t being paid attention to. Now that mental health issues have escalated for some teens, we can be more aware.”
Thomas said the best word to describe the effect of COVID-19 fallout on teen development is “stunted.”
Thomas said her Sacramento, California, practice has grown since the pandemic—in fact, the calls are overflowing. She said it’s been difficult and gut-wrenching keeping up with all the people who need help, especially when she hears of their hardships—parents losing jobs, teens forced to come home from college, increases in anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
A part of the problem teens face is that the people that they rely on are also suffering amid the fallout of the pandemic.
How to Move On
Should certain teens be treated for trauma? According to the joint statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics et al., the answer is an urgent yes.“Development is not so much delayed by the pandemic but reshaped by it. Rather than asking high school seniors to ‘go back to normal’—which returns them to their sophomore years—we need to ask them and the systems that serve them to recognize their new development path,” Hussong said.
“It’s up to us adults to fix this, because children are not going to be able to fix this themselves,” McDonald said.