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The first lockdown caused a significant increase in depression symptoms among children, highlighting the unintended consequences of school closures, according to a new study from the University of Cambridge.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government implemented a national “lockdown” that involved school closings and social distancing. There has been widespread concern that these measures have a negative impact on the mental health of children and adolescents. However, to date there is relatively little direct evidence for this.
The most direct way to measure the association between the onset of confinement and children’s mental health is to follow the same individuals over a period of time and look for changes, the so-called “longitudinal” changes.
To test whether changes in emotional well-being, anxiety and depression symptoms occurred during confinement since their initial evaluation, a team from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge Medical Research Council (MRC), examined data from mental health assessments on 168 children (aged 8 to 12) before and during the UK shutdown. These evaluations included self-reports, caregiver reports, and teacher reports.
The results of their study are published today in Childhood Disease Archives.
Relative to their own pre-pandemic scores, the boys tended to show more symptoms of depression during confinement. Although these symptoms vary among children, the impact of confinement can still be seen because the size of the effect is large. The researchers used the variability in the scores to estimate how large this increase is.
To give an indication of how large this effect is, imagine classifying children into 100 ‘percentiles’ depending on their scores. A child in the 50th percentile would be exactly in the middle of the distribution. But a child in this position before the pandemic could expect to be at the equivalent of the 77th percentile during confinement. In other words, if you randomly selected a child from the sample, there is a 70% chance that their depression symptoms were worse during lockdown than before the pandemic. “
Slead author, Dr. Duncan Astle, MRC Brain Sciences and Cognition Unit
“National lockdowns with mass school closings are unprecedented, so entering this crisis, no one could say definitively what impact it would have on children,” said Giacomo Bignardi, a doctoral student in the Brain and Cognition Sciences Unit of the MRC.
“Our study is one of the first to follow the same children over time during confinement and suggests that the symptoms of depression among the children worsened during this period. This effect was independent of age, sex, and status. socio-economic family of children “.
The team found only very small and non-statistically significant changes in the boys’ scores for emotional problems and anxiety during confinement.
Dr Astle added: “Childhood is a period when mental health can be particularly vulnerable to reduced peer interaction and loneliness. Now that children have returned to school, their well-being, socialization and enjoyment are crucial.Teachers may need additional resources and training to help them support children with a bad mood.
“Even before lockdown resources for child and adolescent mental health services ran out, and that was in a context of worsening mental health among children. Our findings suggest that lockdown measures will likely exacerbate this. The education sector will suffer the initial brunt of this. “
The researchers say that the impact of lockdown measures on children’s mental health may depend on a variety of factors. A recent study found that loneliness in children was associated with later mental health problems, particularly depression. In addition, during the confinement, the children had fewer opportunities to participate in games and other fun activities that help improve their mood.
Source:
Magazine reference:
Bignardi, G., et al. (2020) Longitudinal increases in childhood depression symptoms during the COVID-19 lockdown. Childhood Disease Archives. doi.org10.1136 / archdischild-2020-320372.
