| Translate This News In |
|---|
In December of last year, Zhang Meng had a breakdown. The Beijing campus of the 20-year-old university student was repeatedly locked down by COVID, leaving the student sobbing on the stairs of her dorm.
She had spent the majority of the lockdowns locked to her room and unable to meet up with pals. She had to follow stringent rules on when she could use the bathroom and canteen. Zhang, who calls for face-to-face social interaction as a need, claimed that the limitations had “removed the safety net that was holding me up and I felt like my whole being was crumbling down.”
She received diagnoses of severe depression and anxiety in that month.
Yao, 20, who requested that just his last name be used, experienced his first breakdown while a boarder in high school and couldn’t understand why lockdown procedures were so strict. When he cried so hard, he claimed, “it seemed like my insides were crying,” he was forced to seek sanctuary in a school restroom.
Yao made an attempt on his life in early 2021 while attending university in Beijing. He was unable to get over his sadness and was also disappointed that he had not enrolled in the courses he wanted to for fear of upsetting his father.
China, which is determined to eradicate every COVID outbreak, has implemented some of the hardest and most frequent lockdown measures in the world, claiming that doing so saves lives and citing its low pandemic toll of only 5,200 thus far.
Though the policy’s effect on mental health worries medical professionals and has already taken a toll as evidenced by Zhang and Yao’s experiences, it is an initiative that has showed little sign of giving up.
The British medical magazine The Lancet published an editorial in June that claims “China’s lockdowns have had a massive human cost with the shadow of mental-ill health badly influencing China’s culture and economy for years to come.”
Particularly, specialists worry about the mental health of teenagers and young people, who are more susceptible due to their youth and lack of control over their life, as well as those who are dealing with far larger economic and educational pressures than previous generations.
Potentially a sizable number of young people are affected. The Education Ministry predicted in 2020 that 220 million Chinese children and teenagers have been imprisoned for extended periods of time as a result of COVID regulations. An inquiry from Reuters for an updated number and commentary on the subject was not answered.
Pressure on Children
The COVID limitations have occasionally put young people in dangerous positions.
For example, during Shanghai’s two-month brutal lockdown this year, some 15 to 18-year-olds were forced to isolate by themselves in hotels since they were unable to go home.
According to Frank Feng, vice principal at Lucton, an international school in Shanghai, “They had to cook for themselves and didn’t have someone to chat to so it was actually very hard for them.”
There is a paucity of information on the state of juvenile mental health in China, the effects of lockdowns, and the epidemic, but what there is is not good.
According to a study of 39,751 students done in April 2020 and published in the American journal Current Psychology in January, almost 20% of Chinese junior and senior high school students learning remotely during lockdowns had suffered suicide ideation. Suicidal ideation is sometimes defined as the feeling that one would be better off dead, even though the person may not have been intending to end their life at the time.
The number of searches for “psychological counselling” on the Chinese search engine Baidu increased by more than three times in the first seven months of 2022 compared to the same period the previous year across all age categories.
COVID lockdowns have frequently occurred during adolescent students’ crucial exam years. If the stigma of infection isn’t enough, many families isolate for months before exam periods out of a desperate attempt to avoid missing a crucial exam because they might contract COVID or, much more frequently, be thought of as close contacts.
The majority of students are single parents as a result of China’s one-child policy from 1980 to 2015, and they are aware that they would eventually need to assist their parents.
A Fudan University survey of 4,500 young people this year found that 70% of them reported feeling anxious to varying degrees.
The pandemic and lockdowns are also believed to be contributing to the intense pressure people feel to succeed in life. This pressure is symbolised by the so-called “lying flat” movement, which gained significant social media traction in China last year as many young people embraced the idea of doing the absolute minimum to get by.
A Twenty-Year Toll?
The Education Ministry, on the other hand, has started a number of initiatives to improve the mental health of students during the pandemic, including the introduction of required mental health classes in colleges and a push to increase the nation’s pool of school counsellors, therapists, and psychiatrists.
However, the ministry’s initiatives to place counsellors in schools are very new, and mental health has only recently begun to receive attention in China. A lot of schools wouldn’t have had one the previous year. A minimum of one counsellor for every 4,000 pupils is required nationwide, according to guidelines it published in June 2021.
The issue has also been covered by official media.
According to Lu Lin, head of Peking University’s Sixth Hospital, COVID’s “toll on people’s mental health might last for two decades,” according to a June 6 article in the China Daily that focused on how COVID curbs on vulnerable populations, such as teenagers, affected their mental health.
A third of those who sequestered themselves at home, according to data from the beginning of 2020, had health issues like sadness, anxiety, and insomnia, he said.
Zhang’s perspective has been totally broken as a result of lockdowns and the melancholy that followed. Disillusionment with the way lockdowns have been handled has inspired interest in studying overseas for the once-satisfied student who had intended to study Chinese language and literature.
“I had a strong sense of patriotism when I graduated high school, but that feeling is slowly ebbing. More common than a lack of confidence in the administration is the idea that the smell of masks and sanitizer has penetrated into my bones.”
