The Kids Were Not Alright

Really, it was a social experiment. Put thousands of 18-year-olds together in an enclosed space, living in cramped flats, seeing the same randomly chosen people every day, with no clubs or societies or bars or clubs. And as one person put it, “the social experiment went really badly for most people”.

Libby Elliott, Maisie Outhart and Ella Robinson in the Manchester Mill, June 25th 2023

Along with other mental health professionals, I have been hugely concerned about young adults’ well-being during and since the pandemic. The failure of policymakers to acknowledge and adequately weigh up the potential for harm when planning public health measures, and the failure of many professionals working in education and young people’s health to adequately advocate for them has been shocking. I mostly work with children and teens (I have written about thoughts about these younger age groups during the pandemic previously). My professional experiences since March 2020 are in line with what one would expect if you have not been living under a rock and are aware of the wealth of evidence that has emerged, describing the terrible impact of the pandemic response on children and young people.

A UCL study published this week is only the latest to conclude that what was perpetrated on the young by the U.K. Government in 2020-2022 was nothing short of a disaster: “The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible,” the report said. “It will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.”

Given that there were voices during those years trying hard to alert Government, media and society as a whole to the obvious harms of public health policy that was myopically obsessed with a disease that did not impact children while imposing restrictions which evidently would hurt them, it has been a depressing – and frustrating – time.

I work in private practice. During the pandemic, due to the difficulty accessing services and increased need in this age group, in addition to my usual clientele I also had a number of student clients. They described new or exacerbated psychological distress developing in the context of the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves. I heard various upsetting accounts and personal experiences. I was alert to the incredible pressure these young people were under and how difficult it was to support them as I would like, given that many of the the behavioural strategies I would be suggesting were impossible due to restrictions.

In November 2020, during the second national lockdown, I watched students at Manchester University tearing down barriers that had been erected apparently to ‘keep them in’ or maybe (as the University suggested in a hasty public apology in the response to what was quickly turning into a PR disaster) to keep people out? It doesn’t really matter – in the crazy world of 2020, it was probably both. The important thing was that young people were actually effectively being barricaded in their place of residence by the university authorities, in the name of public health. It was unbelievable. I watched those students in the grainy images taken on mobile phones and wondered anew what life must be like for these young people, locked up in their Halls of Residence, newly away from home, many with vulnerabilities. They were deprived of most of the normal experiences of university life and were now navigating such extraordinary social circumstances. I cast my mind back to my university days and imagined the dynamics that would be at play. I thought about the psychological difficulties experienced by my young adult clients and wondered how students such as these might manage in these circumstances. What would it actually be like to be locked in halls with stressed people you hardly knew, with no outlet and no idea of when this would end, with all the usual social and sexual dynamics and academic pressures of student life at play. It seemed to me these students had been placed in an intolerable position, but that few in Government, media and society seemed to care much.

This week I gained belated insight into the world behind the barricades at the Fallowfield Campus in 2020. The article appeared on a local news website in Manchester, and is written by three students who were first and second year students at the University of Manchester in Autumn 2020. It is a comprehensive description of the extraordinary circumstantial, relational and social pressures that U.K. students were under during the pandemic and reads like a Halls of Residence Lord of the Flies. I would like to think that Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock might read it too, and that Baroness Hallett and her team might add it to their reading lists and reflect on the horrors within. I won’t hold my breath.

These students provide unique insight into the world which was born when students were “stuck in our rooms all day with no outlet”, except for the illegal parties “which mattered a lot” because there was nothing else.

Whereas previous generations of students would meet every day at lectures and at the library, we sat in our rooms accessing our reading online. Lectures were video calls, some of which people slept through with their cameras turned off. By second term, you could book a socially distanced slot for an hour in the library.

Imagine being 18 years old, living in flats or on corridors with people you hadn’t chosen to live with and were just getting to know, but “all of a sudden you were with them every moment of the day”, with no escape.

What quickly developed was a deeply cliquey and reactive social life where you would panic if you weren’t invited to every single little thing. Everyone’s lives were so restricted and so enclosed and so comparable. You could hear the parties. You knew who was hanging out with whom. 

This was a world in which it was “all the normal uni stuff, but… extreme”, a world of “destructive social dynamics”, of intense social hierarchy (unsurprisingly favouring the rich London kids, the good-looking rugby boys, the DJs and anyone who knew them), sexual dynamics (definitely not favouring the girls), social exclusion embedded by the lockdown and after by the ‘Rule of Six’ (“Social Exclusion round two”, as the students put it) and compounded by anxious obsession with social media and intense fear of missing out. A world in which you were “beholden to do what your flatmates wanted to do”, which often meant drugs, which unsurprisingly became a much bigger part of the student experience during the pandemic. One student’s main memory of her first year was “the bitching”:

It felt like a year-long summer camp. It was so, so enclosed. Getting irritated with your flatmates is normal. But normally you have an outlet – places to go and other people to speak to. Plus, there was much less to talk about – people didn’t have funny stories about weird guys they had met or sports matches their friends had played in. All news was flat news. Everything was internal. You’re in a boiling pot.

You don’t have be to a psychologist to recognise the utter toxicity of this environment and to imagine the mechanisms by which many young people’s mental health deteriorated. You just have to remember what it is like to be 18, and apply a little empathic imagination.

Readers may also want to remember that after months during which students had been denied access to normal university activities, socialising and in-person lectures and had been subjected to enforced self-isolation in box rooms (whilst paying for this privilege), they were at one point facing the anxiety-inducing prospect of a two-week mandatory isolation in halls of residence over Christmas 2020, with Matt Hancock refusing to rule out this ordeal. Readers may also remember that students were encouraged to return to the reopened universities in September 2020, and then blamed for the rise in cases that autumn, prompting the Matt Hancock infamous “Don’t Kill Granny” comment. In the words of an opinion piece in the student Varsity magazine in April 2021, in 2020-2021 students were being stigmatised as “antisocial disease vectors”. In February 2021, universities were neglected in the ‘roadmap out of lockdown’, with theme parks and zoos and hospitality taking precedence, and leaving many students with lingering restrictions and ongoing uncertainty for longer than most within the general population. 

There is now an entirely predictable plethora of evidence about the deterioration of young people’s mental health during the pandemic – including specifically students.

In 2020, eight students’ lives were lost in the U.K. during the first month of the autumn term through suicide or drugs-related deaths. In the words of the father of 19 year-old University of Manchester student Finn Kitson, who died in student halls in October 2020, “If you lock down young people because of COVID-19 with little support, then you should expect that they suffer severe anxiety”.

The student voices in the Mill article provide useful context to this mental health disaster and the associated tragic loss of life. It is also a useful reminder of the behaviour and attitudes of ministers, policymakers and university officials, who imposed these harmful measures and who now seem surprised by the entirely predictable consequences – and increasingly try to distance themselves from them. As Dame Sally Davies, Former Chief Medical Officer and now Master of Trinity College Cambridge, shed crocodile tears at the Covid Inquiry last week – stating that lockdowns (which she supported) had “damaged a generation”, that children and young people were still suffering the effects of lockdowns and that she had found it “awful watching young people suffering” – I was reminded of the account of life at Trinity College during the pandemic given to me by a client. She was taking legal action against the college due to her psychological distress and her belief that the college had failed to allow reasonable adjustments to accommodate her anxiety and depression when the enforcing of COVID-19 guidance. She described the regime presided over by Dame Sally as “one of the strictest in all Oxford and Cambridge colleges”. She told me that students were “strongly encouraged” to stay in their room at all times, to wear masks at all times when leaving their room – including to go to the bathroom – both indoors and outdoors on College property (including on the fields at the back of the college), and that these rules were enforced via CCTV surveillance and porters patrolling the stairways to ensure students did not associate with those outside of their ‘household’ (which could mean as few as four people living in rooms off a single staircase). 

I also remembered the email from Dame Sally, addressed to students and reported in the Varsity in February 2021, urging students to “stay at home unless they face imminent danger” and to “join our wonderful silent majority of students who are resiliently getting on with studies and life at home”.

The riposte that young people are ‘resilient’ was used frequently during the pandemic to minimise the impact of devastating social restrictions that interfered with their ability to engage in the normal developmental tasks of childhood and young adulthood and the activities (social connection, social engagement, sport and exercise) that we know are essential for good mental health. The full impact of these extraordinary measures and events on children and young people’s wellbeing, development and future is yet to be fully understood but the indications so far (in terms of public services, mental health, physical health, education and young people’s long-term prospects – particularly for the most vulnerable and socioeconomically deprived) are not good, as the UCL study confirms.

It would be nice to think that, at some point, some of those responsible will recognise that this crisis was avoidable and predictable, and that young people – who were never at any significant risk of COVID-19, and whose safeguarding and nurturing is the responsibility of all of us – were spectacularly failed. I hope that people are held to account – in Government and in universities – and that we will resolve as a society never to subject our young people to such a catastrophic social experiment ever again.

Dr. Zenobia Storah is a Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychologist who currently serves as Clinical Lead at the Knowsley Neurodevelopmental Pathway in Liverpool.