Young People Want You To Talk About Mental Health During This Pandemic

By Rainesford Stauffer


Ya’el Courtney has only been homebound — or participating in social distancing, a means of trying to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus — for a number of days, and she already feels guilty for not being efficient. The 24-year-old first-year Harvard Ph.D. Student’s day-to-day life, which used to consist of the fitness center at 6 a.M., Classes, working in the lab, and evening meetings up until 9 p.M., Right now exists solely in the confines of her house. She’s fielding suggestions from her neuroscience teachers and advisors — several of whom, she says, are implying that students right now have more time to put into their work.


“I'm so anxious I can barely pay attention and accomplish anything, less more than usual,” Courtney tells MTV News. “I also can't visualize my therapist as I generally would, so it feels like my avenues for dealing with these feelings are diminished.”


There’s good reason to feel like the world is shuttering as social distancing becomes the new normal: Campuses are closing or moving classes online, while employers transition their offices to remote work as soon as possible, and bars, restaurants, and public gatherings are shutting down. Add to that the stress of potential physical illness, and it’s understandable that these substantial changes to social structures can pose mental health challenges, too.


While Courtney points out that young people have a responsibility to social distance sort in attempt to help mitigate the novel coronavirus’s spread, she wishes we were also talking more about the mental strain of losing your routine and customary support systems. “It's not wrong to grieve what you've lost, it's not wrong to admit that this is a really hard thing,” she says.


“I am anxious all of the time,” Meg, a 25-year-old who works in advertising, tells MTV News. (She isn't using her last name to protect her privacy.) While her job is routinely high-stress with long hours, the threat of COVID-19 has fine-tuned it radically. “Now, not only are you spending your free time scrolling through social media and becoming anxious about this virus, you're also spending your working time indoor it while also attempting to identify how your client should react to it,” she says. While other reactionary assignments might permit you to step back and regroup at the end of the day, she explains that “with this, you're entrenched in it all of the time.” She had her first panic attack in months last week.


Diagnoses of anxiety and depression in young people are on the rise, and they’re disproportionately feeling the crunch, according to a 2019 study from the American Psychological Association. Nevertheless while one in four Residents of the
U.S. reported having to pick between paying for mental health treatment or day-to-day necessities, that can be a particular struggle for young people or students, who often have lower incomes and are at the mercy of their guardians or campuses to allocate the help they need.


That was the baseline before the coronavirus outbreak. Right now, young folks are fielding questions about job security, where education goes from here, and why the nation will be modified permanently by the coronavirus — and gaps in mental health care are further exposing themselves as a significant barrier to well-being throughout a time of chaos and isolation.


Things are especially complicated for retail workers, several of whom feel they cannot afford to call out of work. Brie, a young worker at the minimum-wage level, says the emotional labor generally involved with her work has been exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak. (She isn't using her last name to protect her privacy.) She’s not only spending her shift stocking shelves while keeping her distance although also relaxing customer worries and relaxing their panic, along with managing her asthma and recovering from a bad case of bronchitis, “which I worked through group in attempt to keep from using any of my unpaid sick hours, in case there would come a time Once I physically couldn't.”


“I'm internally panicking myself and exhausted because of it,” she says. “We're somehow supposed to balance following all of the rules required to keep coronavirus from spreading — any time working retail essentially breaks all of these rules — and not complain about it either.” She’s been taking a lot of naps and doing a lot of journaling, along with “taking moments to breathe a lot” in a task to deal with the added stress.


“Above all, we really do need to be paying attention to those who do not get to work from residence and who are living paycheck to paycheck,” Meg adds, highlighting in particular how people who work at grocery stores or in hospitals “are at the frontlines of this illness. If anything, I hope that folks recognize how critical it is to be kind to everyone.”


And as many inequities have been laid bare while in the virus’s escalation, prioritizing mental health in the age of coronavirus compounds an existing crisis. There are insufficient counselors in high schools to start with, and several colleges struggle to keep up with a necessary for mental health and psychiatric care. Right now, students working remotely might not have access to their schools’ mental health resources at all. Some young people — and especially young people of color — don’t make enough to afford out-of-pocket charges for therapy, and others lack insurance coverage to offset the cost. These barriers put young adults in a precarious position while in a world pandemic: With the needed concentrate on social distancing and protecting each other’s physical health, how do they preserve their mental health, too?


According to Laura Horne, the Chief Program Officer of Mobile Minds, a leading company on college students and mental health, unexpected life transitions and other stressors can have an added effect of triggering or worsening existing mental health concerns. She recommends making efforts to keep your routine as much as possible, and also staying connected through social media and video calls, seeking news from reliable sources, and watching a movie or practicing yoga if those activities help ease your worries. And personalized well-being shouldn’t be an afterthought, even in the midst of global chaos.


“We're all in this with each other and we can lean on each other and be weak together in this time, because we are all impacted one way or another and can lean on each other,” Horne says.


And young folks are already developing new ways to prioritize connecting with others in back of video chats and sort messages with companions. Among them are Ananya Singh and Ryan Dratler, two 17-year-old high schoolers from New Jersey who are planning to launch a podcast for their peers that will trim light on strategies to stay happy and efficient while in unpredictable times.


For Ryan, the pandemic and the recommendation to socially distance that soon followed “made me feel powerless.” He found how much talking about his feelings helped, and adds that the podcast will permit him and Ananya concentrate on connecting with others and making a social element into their routines.


“It has certainly been stressful to observe the global repercussions of the pandemic, and to have so much uncertainty and fear being spread,” Ananya says, adding that while in the initial few days of social distancing from school and her job, she was mad and lonely. She’s since congregated a day-to-day routine for herself with physical activity, reading, FaceTiming, cleaning the residence, and continuing her environmental activism online.


Meanwhile, Lily Schur and Henry James, 17-year-old high school students in Connecticut, began the “Kick Corona Challenge” on March 16, days right after school closures dramatically modified their daily lives. The project uses social media to lay out a “challenge,” like “tag us in your best homemade recipe,” to help spread positivity.


“The quantity of sheer panic and uncertainty boiling through our nation has put a lot of stress on the entirety of the American population, if not globally,” Lily tells MTV News. James agrees, adding that, “It has only been five days of ‘social distancing,’ and I can already feel the effects.” Both believe the online engagement can assist individuals feel much less stressed and much less isolated.


Not each person has noticed their routine yet: 16-year-old student Emanuelle Sippy, who lives in Kentucky, tells MTV News that her school district is still attempting to calculate how to distribute off-campus instruction to several students. “Students who don't have technology access, healthy meals, health care, as well as a safe residence environment are facing challenges that I'm not,” she explains, adding that several of students in her district receive free or reduced-fare lunch. “And this pandemic will probably affect their trajectory more than those of us who can access support, even if our schools don't distribute them.”


As for Jasmine, a 17-year-old high schooler in Alabama, “the scariest part is living in an increased state of uncertainty. It feels like the world is in a constant state of panic already, [and] each tragedy magnifies the malice of just living throughout this time period,” she tells MTV News. (She isn't using her last name to protect her privacy.) Though she’d never heard the term “social distancing” before, she says she’s making use of the “much-needed break” to catch up on sleep, complete scholarship applications and homework, and spending time making music and writing.


That so several young folks are also leaning into their preference streaming platforms and social media eats probably isn’t as bad as parents think it is, either. “Technology, as much as it could be a problem, is probably one of our best companions right now,” Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, tells MTV News. She encourages people to be able to see their digital meetings and activities as a “actual activity” — and that planning video calls or virtual movie nights just like we would any other social activity can be accommodating in the long run.


“I don't think people even realize how much they rely on seeing other people day to day,” Gold says, adding that although we reside in a very individualistic society, human beings are still communal by nature.


Normally, in times of transition, stress, or struggle, weak people could plan coping strategies with their therapists or mental health providers ahead of time, though COVID-19 didn’t give us that luxury. That’s why focusing on positive coping strategies is crucial: “It's sort of like backwards planning,” Gold says. “And how do we find ways to cope and do self care in a fully different environment than we've mostly been exposed to?”


It currently seems impossible to predict what life could look like following an international pandemic of this scale, yet young folks are already rising to the challenge, and incorporating the lessons they’re learning in real time for the next day forward. And they’re not alone, either: Gold also hopes there really is give attention to the fall-out, and that we are all willing to address the mental health aftermath. “We can't just pretend it didn't happen and not then support people afterwards,” she says.


You will help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Not each person has the alternative to reside at house, yet in case could, you must! Social distancing is the new typical, and we’re here to help.