Editorial: Mental Health and Schools: Has the Time Arrived?

Abstract

The focus of public discourse around schools over the past 2 decades in the United States has been around the response to or prevention of school shooting incidents. This often became a rallying cry to compensate for a recent history of tragic events (mass shootings and school shootings as a subset) that seem to have no end nor sufficient political will to pursue definitive deterrents.¹ However, in recent months, we have faced a new experience around the role that schools have in promoting the mental health of our youths as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools all around the country were forced to shut down to prevent the spread of the virus, and students have had to rapidly shift to online learning from home, with at best parental assistance, isolated from their teachers, peers, and the familiar environment and structure of schools. Many have reported rising problems with myriad educational challenges, with students falling behind academically, struggling to learn through virtual environments or distance technologies, experiencing increasing frustration with learning, along with their parents, and increasing expressions of distress from social isolation and loneliness.² These experiences have been associated with worsening and parallel mental health challenges, including worsening impact of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), worsening depressive and anxiety symptoms, children on the autism spectrum battling multiple changes, with rising youth psychiatric hospitalizations.^3,4 The only children who have seemed to do better are those with social anxiety symptoms, who are temporarily protected from their daily stress triggers, but who will face them with a heightened vengeance once the pandemic is over.