Britain is sleepwalking into a mental health crisis as the government struggles to deal with the monumental effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Primary school-age children are considered especially vulnerable to anxiety and emotional and behavioural issues. Polly Waite, co-author of a University of Oxford study into the health of children and adolescents during the pandemic, revealed that the number of children who would meet the threshold for clinical diagnosis had increased by 35% during the pandemic.
“That isn’t the only alarming figure, we know that children from lower-income families are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer poor mental health and this inequality persisted throughout lockdown. There is a domino effect: elevated family stress in the coming months around finances, jobs, social restrictions, uncertainty – all of that poses a huge risk to the emotional and mental safety of kids as well as their anxieties around peer relationships in schools, exams and learning.”