Going down as a class

Teen mental health plummets during pandemic

By; Elliott Prehm

Mental health. It’s a difficult and touchy topic, yet also at the same time a very normalized conversation in today’s world.

Everything we knew and loved was swiped away from us with no time to say goodbye. With the mental health of teens and adults alike plummeting during the pandemic, there has been more news coverage and posts about mental health in hopes that everyone can get the help they need.

As a class, our mental health has been negatively impacted over the pandemic. Before the quarantine, most of us described our mental health as good. Now that we stay at home locked up by ourselves, our mental health is more on the “OK but iffy” side of things.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this: increased time with family, decreased time with friends, an entirely different way of learning and social media taking over our lives.

You’ve probably heard people say that this should be the easiest school year, but that’s far from the truth.

Stress from our daily online class is one of the biggest reasons our mental health has taken a dive. Most teachers are trying to make things easy on the students by giving us less work and adjusting due dates, but it is still stressful. For all of our lives, we’ve woken up, got dressed and headed to a building to learn. Now when we wake up, we just open a laptop and listen to our teachers through a screen. There is no more social interaction with online school, and even those going back to in-person school will still not have the same amount of social interaction as they used to.

Just as students started to get used to online school, our schedule was flipped and adjusted back to partially in-person school. Continuously changing events in a short period of time has a negative impact on us. A worldwide pandemic, protests in George Floyd’s name, an election and everything people have going on at home, it’s overwhelming. Add school, and it’s enough to make us hide under the covers, hoping sleep will make it all go away.

Everything is still changing drastically but at least we had a big change that’s putting us in the right direction; the Covid-19 vaccine. Things are starting to get better slowly but surely.

Gen Z is one of the most open generations when it comes to mental health. We spread awareness on social media platforms and are more willing to go to therapy than any other generation.

Whether a teacher, therapist, friend or sibling, having someone to talk about your mental health is super beneficial. If you need help finding someone to talk to there are plenty of online help centers and school resources. If you are not comfortable with that try reaching out to a close friend.

Elliott Prehm // EOTT