Billions of people across the globe continue to live under COVID-19 lockdowns or heavily-restricted life. And for almost all of us, life amid the pandemic in 2020 was an isolating and difficult year. Yet doctors are warning that children in particular are experiencing grave mental health consequences as a result of the lockdowns—leading to an “international epidemic” of child suicide.
The Associated Press interviewed Dr. David Greenhorn on the subject, who works in the emergency department at England’s Bradford Royal Infirmary. The number of mental health crises he has seen, such as suicide attempts, has gone from a couple per week pre-pandemic to now several per day.
Greenhorn said — “In an 8-year-old’s life, a year is a really, really, really long time. They are fed up. They can’t see an end to it.”
Government restrictions that would’ve been unthinkable two years ago have been forced through amid the fear and uncertainty that the pandemic’s outbreak understandably wrought. Advocates undoubtedly hoped to save lives. Yet government restrictions have proven dubious in their effectiveness, with both studies and real-world examples demonstrating little clear relationship between lockdown stringency and COVID deaths.