School children’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

"Introduction

Anxiety and depression are among the most prevalent mental health disorders among youths, are highly comorbid and co-occurring in a reciprocal pattern (Cummings et al., 2014; Long et al., 2018). According to a meta-analysis, the worldwide prevalence rates for anxiety and depression are 13.4 and 6.5%, respectively (Polanczyk et al., 2015), and prevalence rates have been rising (Lebrun-Harris et al., 2022). A recent meta-analysis of children’s mental health during the pandemic showed a pooled prevalence of 31% for both depressive and anxious symptoms (Deng et al., 2023). Another meta-analysis (Racine et al., 2021) assessing a total of 80,879 youth (mean age 13.0 years) globally showed a pooled prevalence for clinical elevated depressive symptoms of 25.2% and anxiety symptoms with 20.5% during the pandemic, which is twice as high as pre-pandemic estimates... 

In the current study, we examined self-reported level of anxiety and depression before and during the pandemic, and the responses to COVID specific questions and quality of life as reported by children aged 8–12 years participating in a preventive randomized factorial trial...

Methods

... Altogether, 56 public schools in urban and rural areas, from 30 municipalities across Norway took part... The participating children (N = 1843) had a mean age of 10.8 years (range 8 years and 1 month to 12 years and 9 months) (SD = 0.7), and 56% were girls (n = 1,039) ... 

Discussion

... The findings revealed that children who responded during the pandemic had higher levels of anxiety and depression than those who responded before the pandemic which supported our hypothesis. Additionally, quality of life was also rated lower by the children during the pandemic than by the children who participated before the pandemic. Particularly for children with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder who tend to worry a lot. Moreover, quality of life was also negatively associated with loneliness ...

[T]he extensive changes in the children’s daily lives, such as school closures and social distancing measures, may have come at a high cost for at risk children, who themselves were not at an elevated risk of severe COVID symptoms. As knowledge about the disease gradually emerged during outbreaks, it became apparent that socially disadvantaged children and those with mentally ill parents were particularly burdened, since the pandemic was especially a challenge for the whole family ...

The study also showed that quality of life decreased with increased symptoms of depression and COVID response. Higher levels of loneliness during school lockdown were associated with lower quality of life."