Research, data and specialists opinion suggest we may face a huge risks for tens of millions of children and adolescents (worldwide) due to covid-19 pandemic indirect mental health effects
At least 80 million children under one at risk of diseases such as diphtheria, measles and polio as COVID-19 disrupts routine vaccination efforts, warn Gavi, WHO and UNICEF
Date: 22 May 2020
An analysis of 24 countries with existing humanitarian crises — from Afghanistan to Yemen — found that as many as 30 million children’s lives are at risk from other diseases, like diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus, if health care systems are swamped by the pandemic and resources are diverted from immunizations. “We are wrong if we think this is not a children’s disease,” said Andrew Morley, World Vision’s president and chief executive. “Experience tells us that when epidemics overwhelm health systems, the impact on children is deadly.”
“As Covid-19 cases surge worldwide, the survival of pregnant women and children is at great risk due to strained healthcare systems, and the disruption of life-saving health services,” said Dr. Stefan Peterson, associate director and global chief of health at the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. In fact, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health warn, for example, that the impact of the pandemic to newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition services might lead to the deaths of 1.2 million children — a 45 percent increase over existing child mortality levels.
“Covid-19 shutdowns will disrupt early learning, formal education and livelihoods,” according to the report. “Measures to curb the disease have worsened existing inequalities, forcing girls out of school and placing them at heightened risk of violence in their home.”
Source: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/covid-19-impact_on_girls.pdf
Disease-containment measures such as quarantine and isolation can be traumatizing to a significant portion of children and parents. Criteria for PTSD was met in 30% of isolated or quarantined children based on parental reports, and 25% of quarantined or isolated parents (based on self-reports).
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, a dramatic increase has been reported in recorded cases of violence against women and domestic violence, both worldwide and in Council of Europe member states.
Thus, infants’ repeated exposure to clinically depressed parents’ flat and negative interaction styles in dyadic parent–infant interactions may contribute to the transmission of a similar depressed interaction style from parents to children in the first year of life and constitute risk for the development of depression. Likewise, repeated exposure to fearful and anxious interaction styles from parents with anxiety disorders in triadic parent–infant–object interactions may contribute to infants’ learning of fear and contribute risk for early intergenerational transmission of anxious reactivity patterns from anxious parents to offspring, and to the development of child anxiety.
The second conclusion is that the extent of exposure to parents’ positive and negative emotions is indirectly linked to infants’ attention allocation to others’ positive and negative expressions. Increased exposure to a certain emotion from the parent in the early months seems to be related to less attention to that emotion both in typically developing infants and in infants of depressed or anxious parents. Enhanced attention to positive expression in infants of depressed parents, and the decreased interest to high-intensity negative expressions in infants of mothers with social anxiety disorder may be the result of a protective mechanism that enhances the chances of positively interacting with others, and reduces the chances of exposure to mothers’ faces, and to negative emotion. In turn, enhanced attention to parents’ and others’ negative emotions in infants of depressed and/or anxious parents may be putting certain children at risk for later psychopathology.
Date: 2017
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5656709/
“And we are noticing some of the calls are getting more violent,” Guerra said. “So the deputies are aware that when we get those type of calls that they are adequately prepared with additional backup. Those are probably the most dangerous calls we respond to.”
Like in Alton, Guerra said calls for domestic disturbances have increased since the shelter-at-home order. And one has been deadly, a murder-suicide on April 16 that Guerra said is a case of family violence.
Source: https://www.themonitor.com/2020/04/25/domestic-violence-rates-concern-pandemic/
Coronavirus: Lockdown ‘increasing’ domestic abuse risks
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-52338706
actions such as social-distancing, sheltering in-place, restricted travel, and closures of key community foundations are likely to dramatically increase the risk for family violence around the globe. In fact many countries are already indicating a dramatic increase in reported cases of domestic violence. While no clear precedent for the current crisis exists in academic literature, exploring the impact of natural disasters on family violence reports may provide important insight for family violence victim-serving professionals. Improving collaborations between human welfare and animal welfare agencies, expanding community partnerships, and informing the public of the great importance of reporting any concerns of abuse are all critical at this time.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152912/
Findings from the Early April KFF Tracking Poll show that among parents with children under the age of 18, nearly three out of five (57%) women say that worry or stress related to the coronavirus has negatively impacted their mental health, up from 36% of women in the KFF tracking poll conducted two weeks prior. The Early April KFF Tracking Poll also finds that women with children under the age of 18 are more likely to report negative impacts to their mental health than their male counterparts (57% vs 32%, respectively).
Date: April 2020
Source: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/report/kff-health-tracking-poll-early-april-2020/
Source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-policy-watch/is-there-widening-gender-gap-in-coronavirus-stress/
“I’ve studied children in crowded apartments and low-income housing a lot,” Saegert said, “and they can end up becoming withdrawn, and have trouble studying and concentrating.” In these situations, modern amenities—such as floor to ceiling windows, extra storage and a communal roof deck— won’t compensate for a fundamental lack of privacy in a child’s home every day.
Susan Saegert, professor of environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Housing Environments Research Group
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/the-health-risks-of-small-apartments/282150/
In cases where parents were quarantined with children, the mental health toll became even steeper. In one study, no less than 28% of quarantined parents warranted a diagnosis of “trauma-related mental health disorder”.
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30096-1/fulltext
These findings indicate that pandemic disasters and subsequent disease-containment responses may create a condition that families and children find traumatic.
While suicide is the tenth leading cause of deaths overall in the U.S., it is the second leading cause of deaths among adolescents ages 12 to 17.8
Findings from the Early April KFF Tracking Poll show that among parents with children under the age of 18, nearly three out of five (57%) women say that worry or stress related to the coronavirus has negatively impacted their mental health, up from 36% of women in the KFF tracking poll conducted two weeks prior. The Early April KFF Tracking Poll also finds that women with children under the age of 18 are more likely to report negative impacts to their mental health than their male counterparts (57% vs 32%, respectively).
Date: April 2020
Source: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/report/kff-health-tracking-poll-early-april-2020/
Source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-policy-watch/is-there-widening-gender-gap-in-coronavirus-stress/
Children to parents suffering from mental illness have a higher risk of injuries than other children, according to a new study. The risk is elevated up to 17 years of age and peaks during the first year of life. The findings highlight the need for parents with mental illness to receive extra support around child injury prevention measures as well as early treatment of mental morbidity among expecting parents.
The study, which was done in collaboration with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K., followed 1.5 million children residing in Sweden and born between 1996-2011, of whom more than 330,000 had at least one parent diagnosed with a mental illness during that period or five years earlier.
Date: April 2020
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32269017
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200408184625.htm
Source: https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m853
Why are children of poor parents more likely to be poor as adults than other children? Early-childhood adversities resulting from social structures and relationships impact children’s bodily systems and brain development through recurrent stress. These socially patterned biological processes influence social reproduction. Social support and interventions can prevent or compensate for the early biological effects of toxic social environments. This article integrates sociological, neuroscience, epigenetic, and psychological evidence to build a model of early-childhood developmental mechanisms contributing to intergenerational poverty. This model captures ways in which social structures interact with biological characteristics and systems to shape life trajectories.
Date: 2017
Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-053252
Other studies to see: https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/120979