Even as classrooms, offices, concerts and weddings have begun to look more like their pre-2020 counterparts, marks of the global pandemic remain visible in new norms and long-term issues.
“COVID-19 affected a whole generation of individuals at every level,” said Khalid Afzal, MD, a pediatric psychiatrist at the University of Chicago Medicine.
In conversations on social media and in other forums, many people share a general sense that COVID-19 had a significant impact on mental health — that it represents a collective trauma from which we will be healing for years. Now that researchers have a few years’ worth of data to analyze, they’re beginning to unpack that mental impact more fully from an empirical standpoint.
The toll of upheaval
According to Afzal, attempted suicide and suicide-related emergency department visits for both children and adults went up significantly within a few months of the pandemic’s onset, as did completed suicide rates. Data from the CDC and researchers across the country also show a jump in rates of disorders like anxiety and depression, and psychiatric treatment centers have reported longer wait times as demand exceeded capacity.
“After a few months, the reality hit people that the situation wasn’t going to change anytime soon,” Afzal said. “And the more they became isolated, the more that isolation compounded with other stressors like financial worries and fear of dying. It’s pretty disheartening to see the toll it took on people.”
He said the interruption of major life milestones like graduations was especially traumatizing for children and adolescents, as were the lack of privacy and relational tensions caused by families being cooped up in close quarters.
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