In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK Government implemented a national “lockdown” involving school closures and social distancing. There has been widespread concern that these measures would negatively impact child and adolescent mental health. To date, however, there is relatively little direct evidence of this.
The most direct way of measuring the association between the onset of lockdown and children’s mental health is to follow the same individuals over a length of time and look for changes – so-called ‘longitudinal’ changes.
To test whether changes in emotional wellbeing, anxiety and depression symptoms occurred during lockdown since their initial assessment, a team at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, examined data from mental health assessments on 168 children (aged 8-12 years) before and during the UK lockdown. These assessments included self-reports, caregiver-reports, and teacher-reports.
The results of their study are published in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Image: Child looking out of a window
Credit: Rod Long
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge