Colman Noctor: Reasons to be worried about post-pandemic teenagers 

Pic: iStock

According to a recent Growing Up in Ireland study on wellbeing, the vast majority of 13-year-olds have settled well into secondary school. 

Most (97%) said they had made new friends, and 92% said they were getting on well with schoolwork.

Growing Up in Ireland is the national longitudinal study of young people, a joint project between the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and the Central Statistics Office (CSO). 

Since 2006, the study has given the Government an evidence base to make informed policy decisions on a wide range of issues based on data gathered from children and young people living here.

The survey of 6,375 children and their caregivers (from report) was gathered between 2021 and 2022 when pandemic restrictions led to repeated lockdowns.

I was surprised by the study’s findings: In many conversations with staff in schools around the country, I have heard primary and secondary school principals describe unprecedented anxiety and stress levels in their pupils, with many struggling to attend school since the post-pandemic re-opening. 

Elsewhere, many adults who work with children have shared their concerns about teenagers, saying many are struggling to make friends and describing themselves as lonely.

Demand for my therapeutic services has never been so high and I repeatedly have to inform parents that I have no space to see their child. Most of my colleagues’ practices are full too.

A deeper dive into the Growing Up in Ireland study reveals the data was collected over the phone between July 2021 and June 2022. 

This was during a time when pandemic restrictions were starting to lift, but many were still in place. 

It was also soon after the vaccine rollout and there was a pervasive sense of optimism. 

Also, the children interviewed were transitioning to secondary school and, having missed the conclusion of their primary school journey, any form of school attendance may have been experienced positively.

Two cohorts of young people

To understand how pandemic lockdowns impacted children, it is helpful to consider them as two main groups. 

The first comprised children deeply involved in extracurricular activities before the lockdowns. 

These young people were negatively affected during the restrictive periods of lockdown as most of their activities had to be paused and they struggled with being away from their peers and activity communities. 

However, they responded positively once the restrictions were lifted and their activities restarted. Many of them seem to be doing well now.

Parents described children in the second group as “thriving in lockdown”. 

Perhaps they were not as socially reliant on peers or activities and so lockdown was less disruptive. 

They may have been more isolative even before the pandemic and they took to the restrictions with greater ease. 

Some of these children may also have struggled in the school environment pre-pandemic.

I know a sizeable number of children who were regularly victims of bullying and welcomed the school closures. Some who I talk to now still lament the days of remote learning.

While these children may have been the ones parents least worried about during the pandemic restrictions, some have struggled to re-integrate post-lockdowns. 

Many have found the return to the busyness of everyday life overwhelming and are presenting with high levels of school absenteeism and experiencing significant separation anxiety when tasked with being away from home or their parents, who were omnipresent while working from home.

It was impossible to judge the impact of the pandemic lockdowns while they were still in place as developmental delays and missed opportunities only started to show their effect as they attempted to re-board.

The teenagers in the 2021-22 Growing Up in Ireland study were born in 2008, which means they are now 15. This is the group I worry about most. Their social and emotional skills have been significantly affected in recent years and I would be interested to see what the study would find if they were surveyed now.

When younger teenagers and pre-teens are asked on the spot about how they are doing, many will minimise the impact of their mental distress. This is not conscious or intentional.

Instead, it’s because many do not have the language skills to articulate complex emotions accurately. If the same children were surveyed at 15 they may well be able to articulate a more comprehensive assessment of how they are doing, aided by their greater emotional vocabulary.

Perspective on mental wellbeing of young people

Gender also needs to be considered. While some young boys have a deep emotional literacy and some young girls struggle to articulate how they feel, in the main, girls tend to be more emotionally open and have a better lexicon of terms to convey how they are feeling.

The phenomenon of girls being more adept at emotional expression is not unrelated to another finding in the Growing Up in Ireland Survey, which reported that 21% of 13-year-old girls reported “low mood”. 

They also reported lower self-esteem and admitted that their parents were likely to observe symptoms of emotional distress in them. This is a deeply concerning finding.

My experience of an unprecedented number of young people looking for support for mental distress is reflected in the figures from the HSE obtained by the Irish Times. 

A total of 6,541 prescriptions for antidepressants were issued for children aged up to 15 in 2012. This figure rose significantly to 15,113 in 2022.

The increase is most pronounced in teenagers aged 12 to 15, with a 150% rise in prescriptions issued, from 4,454 in 2012 to 12,801 in 2022. 

These statistics, which reveal that antidepressant prescriptions to children aged 15 and under have increased by more than 130% over the past decade, offer us another perspective on the mental wellbeing of young teenagers in Ireland.

It’s critical the findings from the Healthy Ireland survey are viewed in the context of the age group and the time they were taken — a pandemic we expected to last weeks not years.

I worry that these findings will be used as a reason to provide less support to young people and their families when they already need so much more.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist