Effects on mental health
December 7, 2022
The pandemic left everyone alone with their families, only being able to communicate and learn online. This isolation took a mental toll on people.
According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic resulted in a 25% increase in anxiety. Furthermore, social isolation led to unprecedented stress and constraint on people’s ability to work and be productive.
Excessive online learning can also cause zoom fatigue, which is stress and exhaustion from learning online for an extended time, according to the Kentucky Counseling Center. It can be harder to focus and concentrate on learning when not in a traditional classroom.
“In most severe cases, they’re not even there. They’re just an empty black box. You have no idea where they are, so I found that pretty difficult during online learning,” Ramroth said.
In addition, many students use school to socialize and make friends but that option was taken away with online learning.
“For kids who use socializing to numb loneliness or feelings of not being good enough because they don’t have connections to people, they did not do well at all. And so, for those kids, it was a lot harder to go back to because they didn’t know who they were to begin with. They didn’t know who to be for each group, which made them incredibly anxious about going back, so it was not good for that group at all,” Oguntala said.
Kids that wanted to avoid domestic issues also struggled during online learning.
“People who had issues with family members or got a break by going to school didn’t like online learning much. So what ended up happening was their anxiety increased because now they are around people who created a lot of their anxiety most of the time. And so that was not a good combination,” Oguntala said.
Even with a widespread increase in mental health symptoms, some kids’ mental health thrived because of the social situations they enjoyed being in.
“People with a lot of anxiety liked it because then they didn’t have to worry about going to school with the social interactions. They didn’t have to worry about the teacher calling on them, so much of that helped. They didn’t have to get ready for school, there was no time scramble, you could just roll out of bed, pull up your computer, and you are good to go,” Oguntala said.
However, some kids were fine regarding mental health. With the internet and social media, people were able to still connect and talk with each other in various forms.
“Online learning didn’t affect my mental health, and it didn’t adversely affect me. I was fine socially,” Zhou said.
Every student had a different experience based on their personality.
“It really depends on the kid. It can’t be that we would never be able to make a blanket statement like that because all the kids are different,” Oguntala said.