Youth mental health improved when schools reopened during pandemic, study finds
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Nine months after schools reopened, the probability that a child would be seen by a provider for a mental health condition was reduced by 43 per cent.
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LOS ANGELES - A study of nearly 200,000 California schoolchildren found that their mental health had improved significantly after schools reopened for in-person learning in 2021, evidence that its authors said shows that the risks of prolonged shutdowns were greater than policymakers understood at the time.
The study, published on Dec 8 in the journal Epidemiology, tracked medical claims for 185,735 privately insured children aged five to 18 in California over the months before and after their schools reopened.
Nine months after schools reopened, the probability that a child would be seen by a provider for a mental health condition was reduced by 43 per cent, the authors found. Spending on mental health medications decreased by 7.5 per cent, and spending on other treatments, like therapy, decreased by 10.6 per cent.
The improvements were more striking among girls.
Dr Rita Hamad, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of the study, said the findings suggested that officials in some parts of the country, in their focus on infection and transmission, had failed to fully consider the social costs.
“This is definitely a piece of evidence that I wish we’d had at the beginning of the pandemic to inform the conversations we were having,” Dr Hamad said. “I think the decisions may have been different if we had seen that the benefits of school closures were being outweighed by risks like this.”
Though it was clear that adolescents struggled with their mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic, evidence on the role of school shutdowns has been slower to emerge. Teasing out that effect is difficult because in 2021, many conditions were changing at once – vaccines had become widely available, and death rates were dropping, among other things.
The new study attempts to isolate the shutdown effect. California school districts reopened in a staggered fashion between August 2020 and June 2021, creating what the study’s authors described as “a natural experiment” of comparing students whose schools had reopened and those whose schools had not.
The researchers tracked clinical coding for depression and anxiety and prescriptions of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
During the period when schools were shut, 2.8 per cent of children were seeing professionals for mental healthcare, they found, and the average monthly mental healthcare cost was around US$50 (S$65). Both measures began declining around four to six months after schools reopened, with a steeper decline between six and nine months. NYTIMES
