The U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has said that an already existing youth mental health crisis has been amplified over the course of the pandemic. Targeting lockdown restrictions directly, Murphy referred to the “devastating” impact which school closures and a lack of socialisation have had on the mental well-being of America’s children and young adults. The Mail has more.
While youth mental health had been a growing concern before the pandemic with increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, Covid has exacerbated this trend into a crisis, Murthy said.
For example, during the pandemic, the number of children and teenagers reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety doubled, according to one study of 80,000 youth around the world.
Children from minority communities and those at socioeconomic disadvantages, as well as those who lost a parent or caregiver to Covid, are at higher risk for Covid-related mental health conditions, the Surgeon General’s report found.
The Surgeon General’s advisory provides recommendations for improving mental health through increasing mental health care access, addressing economic and social barriers that contribute to poor mental health, and more.
In the decade prior to Covid, youth mental health has become a growing concern for doctors and public health experts, and the pandemic exacerbated this concern.
A new report from the U.S. Surgeon General’s office (released Tuesday) provides statistics on youth mental health, as well as recommendations for how to address this challenge.
“Mental health challenges in children, adolescents, and young adults are real and widespread,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a statement about the report.
“Even before the pandemic, an alarming number of young people struggled with feelings of helplessness, depression, and thoughts of suicide, and rates have increased over the past decade.”
For young people, mental health conditions may be caused by both biological factors and environmental factors.
These environmental factors can include relationships with family members, relationships with peers, neighbourhood safety, and social and economic inequalities, according to the Surgeon General’s report.
Prior to Covid, up to one in five children between the ages of three and 17 years-old had a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioural disorder.
This number has increased sharply over the last 10 years, according to the report.
From 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported feeling sad or hopeless increased by 40%, to more than one in three students.
The share of high school students seriously considering a suicide attempt increased by 36 percent, while the share creating a suicide plan increased by 44%.
The Covid pandemic has added further hardship and stressful experiences for America’s young people.
“The Covid pandemic further altered their experiences at home, school, and in the community, and the effect on their mental health has been devastating,” Murthy said.
Covid caused schools to close across the country, disrupting opportunities for learning and socializing with peers.
In addition, many children who relied upon school for access to healthcare and social services had those services disrupted.
Numerous children also faced housing and food insecurity as their parents and caregivers went through job loss due to the pandemic.
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This is fire-fighting rather than addressing the underlying issue that men cannot actually become women irrespective of what the legal profession conjures up.
I’m a man that identifies as a woman because women now identify as men and men can now identify as women. Thank God for the feminist push to remove our differences.
Shall we go back to basics?
Meh. Parkrun. Just a Saturday morning jog.
I know, right?!
As Bob Parr remonstrated to his lovely wife, as he learned of his five year old’s “graduation ceremony” for finishing a year at primary school,
“They keep inventing new ways of celebrating MEDIOCRITY!”
When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody… Straight out of Stalin’s playbook.
Siân Longthorpe – a transgender woman who is biological male – set a new record of 18.53 minutes.
Someonewho’s biologically male is a man. A man playing the role of a woman in public is still a man.
100%, and the article title should read “Parkrun’s Self-ID Gender Rules Have Seen at Least Three Men Win Female Records”
Please can we stop using the term “transgender woman”.
Personally, I’d prefer:
Blokes With Mental Illnesses Win Prizes For Turning Up Mentally Ill
That’s about the size of it
Mental illness is relative – stamp collecting or collecting anything can be obsessive but we would not call that mental illness because for many it is ‘normal’.
Elevating gender identity to a position of an absolute right to “equality” to the detriment of equality for the rest of the population is not equality but a distortion of it.
But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.
One person’s mental illness is another’s normality. Many people walking in your streets have interests and desires you may never discover because they do not have their private thoughts tattooed across their faces. But if you knew their thoughts you might wish you did not.
Some years ago a man who was well over six feet tall shopped in a local supermarket. I only saw him twice in his dress and wig and he was unmistakably a man and unmistakably very tall with huge hands for a man let alone a woman.
And it was at once disturbing and also sad. He looked like he had a knife and fork version of reconstructive surgery on his posterior with what appeared to be very badly executed and lumpy implants.
To have such a compulsion to go to such lengths to try live one’s life as a woman is difficult to understand. Why attract attention like that? Why might anyone believe they are living their dream of being a woman in a woman’s body when that is plainly not so as in this example? It is a self-deception on a grand scale but some people feel a compulsion to live it.
“But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.”
I agree with you, but compassion does not mean encouraging someone to live a lie or letting them believe they can have something simply because they (tell themselves they) really, really want it. Sometimes compassion equals tough love. The real cruelty is allowing people to believe they really can “be a woman” despite being a biological male. Truth is beauty: lies are ugly.
Imagine you have this compulsion – if you can. You cannot be logical with someone with such a compulsion. If you knew people who suffer from the delusions of ‘voices’ – a common symptom of schizophrenia – no amount of ‘tough love’ will shake their belief in hearing ‘voices’ or that they get personal messages over the radio or TV when the newsreader is reading the news.
You cannot reason with them. Logic does not work. ‘Proving’ there are no hidden cameras watching them such as in light bulbs and the like does not work. They still believe the camera is there regardless.
And one thing you can never achieve regardless of what you do is to convince them by logic or ‘tough love.
So let us look again at compassion – and this I mean for the genuine cases and not paedophiles and abusers – who clearly have their own version of a compulsion which to us as ‘normal’ people we might find abhorrent.
This is what compassion means and it does not include ‘tough love’.
compassion /kəm-păsh′ən/
noun
Amazing – two downvotes. Clearly from people who have never experienced others with mental illness.
No compassion here then.
But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.
WTF? I’d like to have some compassion for my desire to avoid sitting mostly motionlessly for prolongued periods after a day of work during which I have to when being in a pub. Instead, I tend to become to butt end of all kinds of jokes and people trying to annoy me in various ways and – not that rare – open attacks because someone’s again convinced that I’m certainly doing this based on some harmful hidden agenda. Some compassion for wearing army boots (have the nice advantage that my feet actually fit into them) and using shoe polish on them would also be nice. And I’m not running around and trying to force any particular objectively wrong world view onto anyone.
Men who have the ‘overwhelming desire’ of live-action roleplaying what they believe to be women and the overwhelming desire to force others to partake in that against their will deserve exactly no sympathy just because of this fact.
Well that all makes no sense whatsoever.
Am I supposed to take this boilerplate countermove of people lacking arguments to support their case at face value? I think I won’t.
What’s your point? You don’t make one.
I appreciate that women have invested a lot of time and money in their sport. But unless they simply refuse to participate, even for a month or two, then this absurdity will continue. I recall the words of Serena Williams when she was once asked how she felt she would do against the men. ——“If I played Andy Murray I would lose 6-0 6-0”—-Enough said.
Or they could hijack the event by having their own awards and medal ceremony and still enjoy their sport.
Perhaps some might sponsor and fund this?
The absolute is to set up competing womens’ sports associations and run their own events under their own rules?
So if that were to happen, the existing sports associations might be forced to recognise two categories of participants – real women and men who have ‘transitioned’ and still award real women first place based on their achievement and ‘transitioned’ women their awards as transitioned women.
If one favours equality and fairness – is that not fair?
I am just investigating possible solutions – so what do you think?
Ha. A downvote – for one sentence!! Must be a world record.
I certainly did not down vote you. Your idea is fine. But imagine having to create new setups for every sport, when solidarity by women not showing up on mass would force u turns.
It is not so difficult. All sports organisations started small and grew. And don’t underestimate women.
Yes, but I feel a NO SHOW would be easier and more effective in the long run, as authorities would then get the message and quit this absurdity.——Setting up entire new bureaucracies would be time consuming and costly. ——-You cannot hold events when 99% of the athletes don’t turn up
They would be no-showing because they would be attending their own events. So a) boycotting and b) still enjoying their sport. A win-win – pardon the pun.
Lauren Jeska was jailed a few years back for stabbing Ralph Knibbs. He, Ralph, was an AAA official. She blamed him for discriminating against him/her.
Ralph Knibbs was one of the finest rugby players never to win a full England cap. He was selected to go on tour to South Africa but decline the opportunity.
It was a miracle that Ralph survived. This Jeska character presented a very real danger to women in addition to stealing their achievements.
Clown world where such a fight is even necessary.
In German, there are three genders: Male, female and neutral. But people in Germany still have only two sexes¹.
¹ This is a bit of an oversimplification, because human sex markers work somewhat like a two-bit binary number which has the following four possible values: 00, 01, 10 and 11. 01 and 10 are the common cases representing female and male. 11 also exists which is both female and male (which is not a third sex, just another combination of two sexes). I don’t know if 00 — neither male nor female, also exists.
Do these sad malcontents really feel proud of their achievements?
Sanity will be restored when all biological women and girls refuse to participate in sport – at any level – if biological males are allowed to participate in women’s events.
And it would help a great deal if women refuse to vote for politicians who believe that a woman can have a penis.
It seems likely our next Prime Minister will have a penis.
Are you saying women should not vote for her?
A good move towards restoring sanity would be to drop these meaningless qualfiers. Wrt sex, ‘biological women’ don’t somehow belong into the same category as ‘biological non-women’ claiming to be ‘non-biological women’ just because they do. Paraphrasing someone else: A man seeking to appear to be a woman is still someone who’s desiring a genuinely male experience no woman will ever share with him.
If you have, or have even had, dangly bits between your legs, you are not a woman.
If you can’t succeed in men’s sport, graciously accept you are not good enough and take up train spotting or stamp collecting, but don’t pretend you’re a woman just to win a race.
You’re not pretty and you’re not clever. A wig and 5 o’clock shadow does not make you a woman.