The other pandemic

Early this month, the Department of Health reported that the National Center for Mental Health had been receiving more calls from adolescents. The report, however, included that such distress calls had been on the rise from all age brackets since the beginning of the pandemic.

It’s the same all over the world. In the US, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, based on data released in June 2021, “63 percent of young people reported experiencing substantial symptoms of anxiety and depression.” In Europe, a Cambridge University-published study has shown that these symptoms are more observable among the older populations, although it is disheartening that, increasingly, young adults, even students, are also falling prey to loneliness, which can lead, as the research has pointed out, to “a sixto 10-fold increase in risk for worsened depressed mood, anxiety symptoms, and sleep problems.”