Students’ Mental Health at School Since COVID-19: Better or Worse?

As our world begins to open up, (in a way) students are having to get used to what life is like back in school again. A whole year and a half of school spent in your pajamas, while in bed sounds amazing right? But did that make life itself necessarily easy for students? I’ll let you answer that yourself.
Now we all know about the famous 2019 pandemic, also known as Coronavirus, or COVID-19. Believe it or not, but this pandemic has taken a toll on many people’s lives in multiple ways. One of the leading ways being; students ‘ mental health going downhill while being in school at the same time. When school goes from being in person for the first half of your life, to online in your bedroom, your body flicks a switch that lets your mind know that change is occurring. For some students, their reaction was not the best, and most of them are still recovering from it. Now that we’re back in person, another switch occurs. What good can that do?
Now I’m not saying that this struggle had occurred for every student in school at this time, but a good majority of students had been diagnosed with some sort of mental health disorder in just the year of 2019 itself. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC) in 2019, 13.6% of children from the ages 5 -17, who are also enrolled in school at the time, had been receiving mental health treatment. Within the past 12 months, 14.8% of boys were taking treatment, while 12.4% of girls were.
With school being back in person, an unsteady ease is creeping up on those same students, and possibly even more. Back to receiving papers, exams, and waking up at 6 a.m. is adding more weight on students shoulders than just an anxiety disorder alone. Not only does this new “switch” in our brains add more stress on a kid with a mental health disorder, this causes a perfectly stable kid to gradually form a mental illness of their own without even realizing it. For those students without a diagnosis, school becomes one of their biggest challenges, when in reality, it shouldn’t be. According to National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 2019, 15% of adolescents within the ages 12-17 reported receiving mental health services at school for their own sake.
But what about now? You know, since things are said to be better now that we’re back in person. When school and mental health are combined, the outcome is never good. In many cases, this leads to one of the top 20 leading causes of death in the U.S; suicide. A touchy subject I know, but when matters aren’t taken into their own hands, this is the result. For some reason, most people tend to think that just because school is back to “normal”, it means the students are back to their “normal “selves too, when this isn’t the case. This needs to be changed. Despite the cons of this tragedy we’ve been facing for the past year, everyone is going through their own issues during this time. The important thing is to remember that you are not alone. If going out of your way to focus on your mental health over a chemistry assignment is the only thing that will genuinely benefit you, do it. If talking to your math teacher because he or she is all you have, take the opportunity to. Students’ lives have been switched around numerous times this past year, and it is completely normal to not feel like yourself once in a while.