Young people were hit hard by the pandemic's restrictions, not least mentally. But in the years following the pandemic, little is known about how they are doing now.
Agnieszka Butwicka from Karolinska Institutet leads the research project Post-Pandemic Vulnerability and Resilience: A bioecological approach towards youth wellbeing in Nordic schools and communities (SISU). She has worked with children and young people for the past 15 years and has encountered more and more young people with mental health problems.
"Every year I have seen an increase in young people seeking help. And to such an extent that the public healthcare system cannot provide sufficient help. No-one expected this. Then the pandemic came and made the problems even worse. The trends we observed before the pandemic seemed to be amplified during the pandemic and led to a boom in mental health problems among children and adolescents," she says.
In the project, they will investigate whether this is the case. Researchers from Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland are involved, and the first results are now available from the Finnish researchers.
Finnish youths still haven't recovered COVID pandemic
They studied the mental health problems of Finnish adolescents before, during and after the pandemic. Between 2015 and 2023, Finnish School Health Promotion (SHP) obtained data from 722,488 students (371,634 girls and 348,857 boys) who were in the lower and upper secondary school in Finland (13 to 20 years old). This data forms the basis of the researchers' study.
The results of the study show that youth in Finland hasn’t been restored after the worsening experience during the COVID pandemic. The percentage of participants experiencing symptoms of generalised anxiety, depression, and social anxiety above the defined cutoff point increased from pre-COVID-19 levels to 2021 and has remained consistently high in 2023.
Loneliness was the only parameter that showed improvement in all groups in 2023.
Girls have the hardest time
While boys exhibited slight improvement, the mental health situation for girls remained unchanged. Moreover, the prevalence of surpassing the pre-defined cut-off for any of the disorders was alarmingly high among girls, raising concerns.
“As it seemed indisputable that the increases in mental health problems among youth during the COVID-19 pandemic were — at least in considerable part— due to the pandemic, we assumed that the symptom levels would have decreased with time after the pandemic,” the researchers conclude in the study, which can be read here in its full length.
This has been found to be incorrect. The proportion of young people with anxiety, depression and social anxiety symptoms increased from pre-COVID-19 levels in 2021 and remained at these higher levels in 2023 among all study groups.
"The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health can be long-lasting. In this study, there was a change for the better among transgender youth was a positive exception. Providing adequate support and treatment for young people with poor mental health is crucial, but solutions to the mental health crisis must have a broader societal perspective and should be developed in partnership with young people," says the researchers.
The findings have been published in the renowned journal The Lancet and can be read here in full: Mental health after the COVID-19 pandemic among Finnish youth: a repeated, cross-sectional, population-based study - The Lancet Psychiatry
