Spent a whole post yesterday talking abt the awful effects that can happen when the media conflates mental health & mental illness, & uses extreme cases as THE example. Now time (no pun intended), to applaud a media outlet for incredibly well-thought-out coverage of mental health (on a continuum).
I’ll share this article link in stories, but look at the title of this @time magazine article Corona’s “Effect on Kids Mental Health.” I’m gonna share some excerpts from the article below, but THIS is an educational article. It talks abt different age groups of kids. It talks abt situational things they are experiencing (life events & questions). It compares those stresses & traumas to the effects of similar time periods on kids (9/11, Great Depression, etc.). Well done by Time!! Some excerpts:
“I’m seeing 100% more behavioral problems,” says Stanton (a psychologist interviewed). “My son, who has learning issues, has 3 meltdowns a day. With my daughter, the problem became addiction to the iPad. She has a TikTok account & created an [alias] of an older girl. We took the tablet away, & there were hysterics. She told us, ‘I want to be on the tablet all the time so I don’t feel so lonely.’”
“The impact on a child’s sense of safety depends on the extent to which the family is affected,” Silver says (another psychologist interviewed). “If there is a loss or if the family has a drastic change in their economic consequences, this event would shape the children’s view of the world.”
“Younger kids have acutely twitchy antennae when it comes to reading the anxious mood of the older people arnd them. The ambient stress in a locked-down household in which parents are fretting, perhaps quarreling, & disinfecting everything that doesn’t move does not go unnoticed by children.”
“For schoolagers & teens, being w parents is all downside, & being w friends is everything. In the case of the pandemic, that essential socializing is out of the question. Silver points out that one of the things that helped Americans rebound after the 9/11 attacks was a sort of great cultural coming together–precisely what can’t happen now.”
