A new study is providing hard data about just how bad school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic were for children’s mental health.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We’re going to turn to another health issue now. It’s about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic when so many schools shut down in-person learning and went virtual to try to stop the spread of the virus. We did a lot of reporting at the time on how this was affecting kids’ mental health.
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KENLEY GUPTA: I was really shocked. I was really sad I couldn’t see my friends.
MARTIN: Kenley Gupta spoke to Lesley McClurg of member station KQED in November 2020.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So NPR was on this story in real time. And now we have a follow-up, a study that measures how much people were affected. It was led by Dr. Rita Hamad of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
RITA HAMAD: We know that schools are important places for social connection. Kids need to see their friends, their teachers.
MARTIN: To find out just how important, Dr. Hamad and her colleagues examined student mental health during the lockdowns and afterwards. Coauthor Pelin Ozluk says reopening schools led to a big drop in the number of kids who were struggling.
PELIN OZLUK: Overall, mental health diagnoses fell roughly 43% relative to the baseline. The largest improvements were in depression and anxiety diagnosis, which had risen during the pandemic.
INSKEEP: The scholars based that finding on a lot of kids, according to the study in the journal Epidemiology. More than 180,000 kids across California were involved. Schools there reopened on a staggered basis. And that gave researchers the chance to compare the kids going back to school with the ones still stuck at home. And among other things, kids returning to school immediately needed less mental health care.
OZLUK: Specifically, mental health-related medical spending fell by about 11%. And prescription spending related to mental health conditions decreased by roughly 8% once districts returned to in-personal learning.
MARTIN: Dr. Hamad says the study gives local leaders an important lesson.
HAMAD: The next time we have a public health emergency of this scale, then there needs to be, hopefully, a lot more discussion informed by evidence like this about what decisions we should be making to ensure we’re paying attention to children.
INSKEEP: She’d also like to see more funding for youth mental health services.
HAMAD: This research suggests that we should probably be redoubling our efforts in that domain instead of cutting back funding.
MARTIN: For the immediate future, Trump administration cuts to Medicaid are expected to reduce access to mental health care for young people.
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