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Mental health is a psychological and emotional state of ones well being. Being mentally healthy during your childhood is important becuase it is when one is developing healthy social skills and how to cope with different problems.Children who are mentally healthy have a positive quality of life and will be able to function in life. Mental health disorders are expressed as serious changes in the way children learn behave and their emotion. It is important to have healthy mental health because it will affect the rest of your life. If one has mental health,the best way to have a good life is to treat what they have when they are first diagnosed with it. It is important so they grow to learn how to manage it. About half of a lifetime mental health problem starts before the age of 14. Our mental health also effects our physcial well being because how we are feeling mentally will affect the amount of exercise we get. “For example, depression increases the risk for many types of physical health problems, particularly long-lasting conditions like diabetes, heart disease and stroke”(CDC).  There are also many mental health disoders like schizophrenia, personality disorders, bipolar disorders, and eating disorders. Some symptoms can be how a child changes how they learn, speaks or act or even how they handle their emotions. Mental health started in 1843 but it was called mental hygiene. “Over 1 in 5 youth  (ages 13-18) either currently or at some point during their life, have had a seriously debilitating mental illness”(CDC). There are different factors that can cause mental illnesse which can be trauma, ongoing medical condition, biological factors in the brain, the feeling of loneliness or isolation. The pandemic did not help with children having a mental health disorder because it caused alot of stress for them.

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+Prolonged

-continuing for a long time or longer than usual

+Willingness

-the quality or state of being prepared to do something:readiness

+Implementation

-The Process of putting a decision or plan into effect

+Pervasive

-(Especially of an unwelcome influence or physical effect) spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people. or affecting everything we do

+Somatic Symptoms

-when a person has a significant focus on physical symptoms, such as pain, weakness or shortness of breath to the level that results in major distress and/or problems functioning

+Irratibility

-the feeling of being angry or frustrated. very easily annoyed and impatient over small things.

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Everyone at the time was preparing for the pandemic but did not expect how long it would last. The pandemic caused many stressors and trauma towards others because of not being able to go out and interact with others as well as the fear of getting the virus. Because the stress of getting the virus was very high for many it caused many stressors.

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While growing up, children need guidance to learn how to be on their own and be independent and to learn how to cope with other things as well. They need support from their parent/caregiver and they ultimately learn from them. If they see a situation, a child will automatically look at their parent to see how they react to learn how to react to those situations. Sometimes parents do not provide a good example which will show a child the wrong ways to cope which will increase the child's mental health in a bad way.

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During the pandemic, everything shut down and it caused many people to stop getting help because they could not go in person to get help. Sooner than later, many people were able to get help by phone calls and video chats with therapists to call from home and still get the help that they need.

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Insurance Companies not being able to Cover for Treatment for Young Children

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Insurance Companies not being able to Cover for Treatment for Young Children

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in some states, some insurance companies do not cover calls or video chats for therapists. Throughout the pandemic, there were emergency orders issued to make tele-mental health calls reimbursable by insurance companies. In Massachusetts that included both video and phone sessions.

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Trauma Affects the Child as well as The Whole Family

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Trauma Affects the Child as well as The Whole Family

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Depending on the traumatic event, sometimes it can affect the whole family and with that, a child will see not only how their parents react but siblings too. As humans, we continue to learn different things and challenges throughout our whole life. But when we are children we are learning the basics of how to live and react to different situations. It is important to grow from mistakes but the pandemic caused many stress emotionally for people. Whether it was a death in the family, to getting the virus. There needs to be an outlet for children because as we are evolving as humans we need to have the right way to live.

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Pregnancy during the time affecting not only the women but then affecting their child

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Pregnancy during the time affecting not only the women but then affecting their child

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pregnancy during the pandemic seemed stressful for many women because they are worried about getting the virus but the virus would affect not only themselves but their child as well. Because of that stress it put stress on the baby which will not help them.

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https://www.apa.org/topics/children/mental-health

https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm#:~:text=Mental%20health%20includes%20our%20emotional,others%2C%20and%20make%20healthy%20choices.&text=Mental%20health%20is%20important%20at,childhood%20and%20adolescence%20through%20adulthood.

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With Americans being vaccinated at a rate of more than two million shots per day, attention has begun to turn to life after the pandemic. But public-health officials are increasingly concerned that more than half a million deaths in this country alone and a year of isolation, closed schools, and lost jobs have had traumatic effects on many Americans, especially children. To talk about what those effects might be, and how to insure that people get the care and support they need, I recently spoke by phone with Dr. Archana Basu, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how children and adults deal with trauma, the distinct challenges facing young adults, and how lessons from the pandemic can be used to improve mental-health care going forward.
When it became clear that a pandemic was going to change our lives, what were you most concerned about, in terms of mental health?
As was the case for a majority of Americans, I don't think I expected what the horizon for the pandemic would be. I doubt that most of my colleagues really anticipated it would last as long as it has. We absolutely expected that there would be an increase in mental-health concerns and some level of distress, because that would be a very typical reaction to an extreme pervasive stressor or trauma, like a pandemic. And we've seen this in the past with other mass disasters. There is an increase in mental-health concerns and distress, and then once safety is reëstablished and a sense of routine is reëstablished, we see a decline and a return to baseline for the overwhelming majority of people, including children. What that's really saying is we are very adaptable, certainly as humans, and as kids. It is with the prolonged period, such as the one we are experiencing now, that we start to worry about more long-term and more pervasive effects.
What effects, specifically?
We are hearing about an increase in rates of severe anxiety and depression-related concerns. We also know that this may have been even more challenging for people who were already struggling with mental-health concerns. There is emerging data to show that rates of self-injuring behaviors have increased as well. The fact is that is what we would expect, and we are seeing a really broad spectrum of mental-health and behavioral concerns. However, I do want to point out that I don't think this is going to be limited to mental-health concerns. I think there are other parts of our children's lives where we're going to see those effects. Some of that might be physical health. Pediatricians have been very concerned about the amount of exercise that children are getting. And there is emerging data to show that sleep- and weight-related issues might be other examples of physical-health concerns.
You focus especially on kids. How might the mental-health challenges facing kids after something like this be different or similar for adults, broadly speaking?
Fundamentally, I think children of all ages-and this is certainly truer for younger children, but really even teens-need a supportive, responsive adult, at least one responsive caregiver, to really help them understand what's happening, to cope with it in terms of thinking about what they're feeling, what they're experiencing. An adult's capacity to cope with the level of unpredictability and isolation is just more varied relative to a child's. One of the biggest things that is different for children is that they are not going to get as much out of digital tools, because they're just much more likely to need the in-person interaction. This is especially true for younger kids. And we know from decades of research that a supportive caregiving environment is one of the strongest buffers for children. And I think that is different for kids than it is for adults. Adults need social support and social connections, but I think their capacity in terms of figuring out a way to access it and to perhaps go longer periods without it is greater than it is for children.

The second thing is the idea of stability. We all benefit from routines and structure, but children are developing their sense of routine and structure, and when there is a stressor or trauma like a pandemic, all elements of their lives are affected. They need an adult to help them develop those routines and structures in this adapted format. And having that sense of stability and predictability-it's true for all ages, but kids really benefit from that.
If children do not get these things that you're saying they need, what are the long-term effects of that?
So, for younger kids, that might look like what we think about as difficulty in regulating themselves, whether it's sleep, whether it's a bigger emotional response to even the smallest kind of challenge that they might otherwise be able to cope with. It may be more irritability or anger, but also somatic symptoms around eating and sleeping. It's a range of symptoms, but broadly in more extreme versions what we think about as anxiety, depression, lack of motivation for school, or lack of desire to connect with other people. In younger kids that might be less willingness to play, or their emotional regulation is going to look different, so more crying, more irritability.
What should the government have done at the state and local and federal level to prepare for this, starting a year ago? And what did they do?
A couple of things have come out of this pandemic period that have been very valuable and that I hope will define future policy. There's always been a shortage of mental-health-care resources, even pre-pandemic, and certainly if you move out of major cities and metropolitan areas, that was definitely true, even more so for children. We were already looking at a system that was really close to capacity or at capacity when the pandemic came along.

And so at this stage, the emerging mental-health landscape really speaks to the need for not only increasing our capacity but fundamentally rethinking the ways in which we are delivering mental-health care. An example of that would be that pre-pandemic, in the state of Massachusetts, where I practice, some insurance companies would reimburse remote tele-mental-health care, and other insurances did not. One of the things that happened in the pandemic across the United States really was that there were emergency orders issued to make this remote tele-mental health reimbursable by insurance companies, and in the state of Massachusetts that includes both video and phone sessions. Recently, in the state of Massachusetts, this has now been made permanent. And this is actually important because, while it makes mental-health care hopefully more accessible to a broader group of people, it also just reduces the burden in terms of commute. But we also know that a video visit requires a stable Internet connection, which is not always possible and not available to every family, and so I think the fact that it also includes phone sessions is important. To me, that is one very concrete example of how policy related to mental-health care can be a game changer.

That being said, I think there are at least a couple of other areas for us to consider. Fundamentally, our health-care system, including our mental-health-care system, is a tertiary health-care system. By the time we see children in an outpatient clinic, they have a diagnosable mental-health condition that they have really been struggling with for a while. In fact, the criteria to diagnose someone and bill their insurance requires that the mental-health condition be actively impairing their lives, whether it's in terms of their school or their relationships. So, fundamentally, we are working in a system that prioritizes tertiary care. And this is a big problem, because we really know that we can work with people, and children in particular, in a preventive manner. There are emerging models of care that have actually been used across the country-I won't say uniformly certainly-but there's been successful implementation of this in different health-care settings across the country, and I think they are becoming more common, which I think is important and promising. Basically, these are integrated models of care where mental-health assessments and interventions are integrated as part of routine care visits, whether it is pediatrics or internal medicine.

The other thing that is emerging is the use of digital tools. There is emerging data to show that, for certain types of mental-health concerns, at low to moderate severity, certain types of digital tools, like those the V.A. uses, are a very effective adjunct to working with a therapist. So that traditional model of weekly hour-long sessions or fifty-minute sessions-we can build on that, and digital tools can really help with that process. There are very effective interventions for anxiety or sleep aid.
What do you compare the pandemic to, or what events do you look to, when trying to make sense of it?

Prior mass disasters such as Hurricane Katrina are one example that we might extrapolate from and learn from. But we know that it's a best-case estimate, because the pandemic has upended every element of our lives, and it has really fundamentally changed how we live, how we work, how we attend school. It's not geographically circumscribed, and it's been prolonged. And it seems like perhaps there's a horizon now, but, as you said, there's still a ways to go. So I think there are ways in which we can learn from prior mass disasters, but also recognize that this is a pretty unique stressor that we haven't experienced before.
Obviously, different kids are going to deal with this in different ways, and, of course, different groups have been hit harder and less hard by the pandemic. So I don't want to make it seem like everyone's had the same experience, but, broadly speaking, does the universality change how to treat it, how to talk about it, how to think about it, how people respond to it? At the very least, people are looking around and seeing other people with similar challenges.
I think actually that's a really good question and for at least two reasons. One of them is that it poses a unique challenge for health-care workers, right? We are also experiencing exactly what the folks we work with are experiencing. We are not unaffected by it. And so there's so much data already out there in terms of the impact of this on physicians and mental-health-care professionals and health-care workers in general. And there is a whole other literature talking about trauma-informed care, which is fundamentally the idea that the trauma is actually pervasive and there isn't an us-versus-them.

This is not to say that we are all experiencing exactly the same thing. I read a quote somewhere that we are all in the same storm, but in different boats. And I think it poses a unique challenge or certainly a need to support health-care workers. But, frankly, also, when I think about children, supporting children really means supporting the systems or the caregivers that support kids, right? And that's most commonly parents and school systems, and there is no one whose life is untouched.

And so in some ways the conversation about emotional health is relevant for everyone. And that is actually perhaps one of the silver linings, or a positive outgrowth, of this otherwise terrible experience: the idea that emotional health is important and central to health is now more common than ever, and it reduces the stigma around it. But it also poses challenges in terms of supporting parents and health-care workers and school systems more.

The second thing I will say is that, even as this trauma has shaken our sense of trust and well-being and predictability and safety, we do see and hear about an extraordinary outpouring of support for one another. And one possible outgrowth of this experience may be that not just our hopes but our efforts toward a more equitable and compassionate society might actually increase. It's not just one section or one subgroup of people for this cause.

This is also a situation where parents and children might be going through something similar.
You're absolutely right, and I think one of the things that we talk about when I work with families is that, for me, working with children is really about working with parents and collaborating with the family as a whole. Even in non-pandemic times, trauma affects the whole family, even if only one member of the family may actually have directly experienced it, it really does impact the whole family, right? And I think it's an opportunity for parents to essentially model and for children to learn and see how parents and adults might cope with something like this, how they engage in self-care, how they prioritize their own health needs. This is also a situation where parents engaging in their own health care and their own self-care is probably one of the best things they can do for their own kids.
Are there any ways in which you would expect aspects of trauma or post-traumatic stress to hit adults more than kids?
The emerging data actually does show that young adults in particular are reporting much higher levels of mental-health concerns and distress over all. And one of the reasons, we suspect, is that young adulthood is really a period when people are figuring out their sense of self, figuring out their identity, moving from the family they were born into to developing their own relationships and maybe developing a family of choice, a professional identity. It's a time for exploration. And I think part of what a communal trauma like this does is it certainly increases uncertainty. There was Pew Research data showing that, for young adults, the economic concerns were greater than the physical-health concerns.
Speaking of developing your family of choice, I know you, specifically, have thought about women and the effects of mental health on them.
Pregnancy is a really sensitive period in terms of brain development for babies, and all types of cognitive, motor, linguistics abilities, and emotion-regulation skills. There's a tremendous amount of research to show that serious stressors during pregnancy can not only be detrimental for maternal mental health but also impact the fetus, impact maternal child bonding and then, ultimately, a child's development.

Typically, pregnant women are often connecting with others in terms of the shared experience. And, in our own study, there were very significant concerns around isolation and loneliness. We know that prenatal and postpartum anxiety and depression are huge concerns. Typical rates range between ten and fifteen per cent, but the current rates are much higher. So I think that is real cause for concern. Some of the recent policies, like the Rescue Act, for example, do have some very specific items that I think are very family-friendly, including one year of postpartum care under Medicare for women and working parents. And I think those types of policies are going to be really critical to supporting moms and babies.
We don't have time to get into school reopenings, which is extremely complex, but is there any aspect of children's mental health that you think is really important for people to understand while this debate goes on? And, if so, what would it be?

This might be very obvious to some people, but I think fundamentally this debate has been framed in terms of choices between mental health and learning. And the reality is, the way we learn best is by feeling safe-we are really able to be more present, and our attentional and motivational systems are much more engaged in learning. Children learn best in safe, predictable environments, where they feel connected. This was true before the pandemic, and it's true now more than ever. I think that emotional health and learning go hand in hand; that's fundamentally how the brain functions. It's not an either/or situation, and so whether schools are reopening or not, I think attending to the social and emotional health of students and teachers has to be part of rethinking this opening process. The mental-health piece is often thought about as an afterthought or something that will inevitably follow. But I don't think that's necessarily the case.

More on the Coronavirus

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Recovering from the Emotional Challenges of the Pandemic

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Isaac Chotiner interviews Dr. Archana Basu, a clinical psychologist, about the potential long-term effects of the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic on the mental health of adults and children.

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1)How are children developing since going through the pandemic?

2) How can Children overcome the mental health caused from the pandemic?

3) Is the upcoming generations going to be affected by this?

4) How was children affected by the emotional challenges that the pandemic has caused?