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insighthenderson
Dec 23, 20214 min read

Adolescent Mental Health in the Age of COVID: Part I


By: Allie Wallace

A DAILY PANDEMIC Within the span of a few weeks, the state of the world became virtually unrecognizable to all of us. With a physical disruption to daily life, we all quarantined, and a new age of connectivity via the internet emerged. I don’t need to tell you the numbers or talk about the constant shift in what we now deem normal. The struggle to see loved ones, to find healthcare, to frantically search for employment and housing; these are the loud and clear present challenges so many people are facing right now. But a silent struggle is there too, and, like COVID-19, it doesn’t care about your housing situation, your social circle, or your access to medical resources. On a large scale, the consequences of such a problem have affected housing, income, and the health and well-being of so many. But on a smaller scale, we are all struggling to maintain a sense of safety, normalcy, and sanity. STUDENTS AND THE PANDEMIC Through the stages of these past long months, the way we perceive the world around us has changed. I’ve observed this change within myself, my friends, family, and classmates. At a stage in our lives when adolescents are changing at a rapid pace as is, we are faced with a new statement that permeates every email, text, call, and event: you’re living through history. It is said by parents, teachers… well basically every person we interact with nowadays and is even the driving force behind this article. It is said with a wary pride, a shaky hope, and an unsure optimism, a conveyance that makes us aware of just how hard the people around us are trying to keep it together. However, despite the guilt, we feel at refuting such a hopeful statement, a lot of us don’t want to live through history. To cite one of my favorite films, Lady Bird (2017), “I wish I could live through something.” It’s a sentiment I related so heavily to just a year ago. When we dream up scenarios of living through catastrophic events that are just as amazing as they are horrific, we don’t romanticize a pandemic, at least not one that lacks its fair share of zombies. There is nothing cinematic about Zoom fatigue for hours a day, your desk littered with sticky notes, or your unmade bed less than two feet away. Daily life, for most of us, just isn’t the “best years of your life” we were made to believe it’d be. As someone who has always found a strange sort of solace in school and my extracurriculars prior to the pandemic, the first few months of agonizing silence and constant awaiting of answers that would never come was a challenge in itself. Possibly the biggest wake-up call being the uncertainty of my teachers as well. As students, it is a frankly terrifying realization that the adults you trust most and look up to for always having the answer, sometimes are just as in-the-dark as you. And, at this age, I know that uncertainty is and will always be another part of life that you must learn to navigate and not let send you into paralysis. But, as someone who has always had a particular problem with not knowing what the future has in store for me, not letting it run my life for the past seven months was easier said than done. EASIER SAID THAN DONE In fact, that mindset may just be the sole source of everything wrong with our brains right now. With the attempt at maintaining the normalcy of a million extracurriculars to keep up with, friends and family to contact, and ordinary schoolwork, the pandemic is one more cloud in the sky, but the one shadowing everything we do. Each menial task, seemingly so straight-forward, feels like trying to run through sand, and just as you get closer to finishing said task, you now must cross the dunes. The heaviness in the air we wake up to every day is a lot, but it’s inaccurate for most of us to simply label ourselves depressed or anxious or at ease. Students’ mental health has been neglected since before the pandemic, and I cannot confidently say that I’ve seen any progress made during it. And it’s doubly as strange since these can all be symptoms of mental health issues during normal times. A constant gut feeling of dread, the clouding of your mind, inability to focus, and never-ending fatigue. These are all symptoms of mental health issues, but they are now making an appearance in everyone, regardless of whether or not they have been dealt with before. For those just now learning to cope with these issues, it is a learning process and one that takes more than a few months. It’s a lifetime of growing, learning, and healing. But for others whose mental health was bad, to begin with, the things they experience now are nothing new, but certainly heightened. We are all learning. As young people constantly at war with ourselves, we need to show our minds as much compassion and understanding as we do to the people around us. Rather than writing a strongly worded email to your brain, open with: “Hi. I hope this message finds you well.” As the uncertainty of our futures scares me now more than it ever did before, the one thing I take solace in is the knowledge that I’m not alone in such feelings. Young people have been subjected to uncertainty and weight resting upon our shoulders with matters such as the worsening state of our environment, every social and political issue under the sun, all while being made to feel as if we have no voice. But, now, all anyone—adolescents and adults alike—can do is take care of ourselves, have compassion for those around us, and hope our futures gain some clarity soon. MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES


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