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.
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Why weren’t mummy and daddy forced to repay the £10,000 damage to the picture frame?
Because the miscreants are adults, at least in terms of age.
I don’t like exemplary sentences.
Two years for wrecking a frame that cost $10,000 and can be easily replaced seems excessive. Replacing the value, a fine and community service would do.
(And for the avoidance of doubt I think JSO activists are as idiotic as their cause.)
It’s a strange world really though. I come back to the horrible things that people in authority do to others on a regular basis, sometimes quite knowingly. Like the invasion of Iraq or the untold damage done during the covid madness.
We definitely live in a multi tiered justice system. The more senior a position of authority you have, the more damage and destruction you can get away with.
You would definitely put and stop to the endless expansion of the state if people in authority would be made to pay for the consequences of their actions.
I am sure there are many like me who applaud the sentences.
The actual value of the damaged propery should be irrelevant. The tariffs for sentencing (the guidlines for judges) to not have a monetary value attached.
Agreed, and I agree with the below comment. It’s not like they’ll even serve all of that time anyway. Meanwhile, my bigger concern is that the UK ( and elsewhere, seemingly ) has a society that is trying to normalize paedophilia. Look at the non-sentences doled out for those caught with child sex abuse images as a comparison. These people get to go about their lives, rub shoulders with decent people, nobody’s checking if they’re keeping a distance from children ( Christ, some of them have children! ) and try their level best not to get caught next time, because this isn’t something that you can just shut off in your brain;
”Two years for the very personification of entitled moronism.
For the first time in her life there are consequences to her actions. It’s… what’s the word I’m looking for? I know: DELICIOUS.
It’s tough way to grow up – but you’ve earned every single second. Your parents should be slopping out with you.”
https://x.com/KiszelyPhilip/status/1839673198142455981
But this Pheobe person is doing this stuff all of the time. When does it become necessary to stop these people? After one incident like this or after 20 incidents. The justice system has actually been very lenient with these people.
Why can’t we just leave these people glued to the wall? Let’s see how they would feel after a few days.
Exactly. Certainly my preferred way of dealing with these Next Tuesdays.
Or glue them together… because if you can’t beat them, join them!
But seriously though that is not a bad idea. They are suggesting that it is our collective responsibility to save the planet by eradicating fossil fuels and and plunging ourselves into the dark ages. So whose responsibility is it to unglue them from the wall? Let the museum close and they can spend the night. If our oil usage has consequences, then so do your tomato soup and glue fetishes.
Maybe after a few days somebody could bring them some soup!
Their cause to many sounds noble and getting rid of fossil fuels sounds plausible. But actually it is not noble to deny the third world fossil fuels that would alleviate their misery and it is not plausible to be rid of fossil fuels since they supply 85% of the worlds energy. ——–So their cause is one based entirely on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. I blame government and a compliant media for having brainwashed these easily manipulated people into thinking there is a climate apocalypse just around the corner, when infact there is no evidence that CO2 from fossil fuels use is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate.
imagine the smell.
Hmm. Could enter them into the Turner Prize?
Or maybe Lego could bring out new enviro sets from various scenes from all this. A couple of Lego characters with hands stuck to a road blocking a Lego Ambulance? Oh! wait…
https://toybook.com/lego-sustainability-news/
Such as this
With people crawling all over the tanker and fiddling with it, where’s the explosion?
Let us remember, back in 2008, when Hedge Fund Billionaire Jeremy Grantham set up the Grantham Research Unit Climate Fraud outfit, including Mega Liar Bob Ward, PhD (failed).
Ward became famed as “fast fingers Ward” and was the go-to guy for all the MSM in their Reality-Denier scams.
Of course, Grantham then had, and very likely still has a portfolio of oil firms.
He also set on our old chum Neil (Professor Pantsdown) Ferguson. The Pandemic and general medical prognosticator that has never been less than one order of magnitude exaggerating risk and outshone himself in some “five orders of magnitude” super scares.
The very bloke who was chosen by the blue arse cheek of the Uniparty to help Stalin’s Nanny Susan Michie in her agit prop nudging.
Now elevated to the WHO, together with Welcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar.
So, are Grantham (and Kyte) somehow to be considered ax Big Oil people?
Well in some sense. I’m certain that Grantham and his chums are bright enough to have no doubt that Net Zero is bollox on stilts.
But destroying coal in the UK (obviously not in China, India, Indonesia etc.) was a good move in boosting the value of his oil stocks. Gas will be next to be destroyed and Ed Milibrain (of Climate Change Act 2008 again) is now facilitating this endgame).
And destroying Western Economies is the ultimate aim.anyway, as Christina Figueres has confirmed.
That tin of tomato soup could have gone to a food bank. What a bunch of degenerates!
Throwing food around is what toddlers do in high-chairs.
Vastly over-rated. Heinz soup and the picture. That said, it’s damage to someone’s property so whatever the law says for that.
I think MajorMajor has it right: Leave them there. Just to make sure nobody assaults them put some sort of barrier around them (which might accidentality also mean that none of their mates could come along and free them). I also think that’s what should be done when people glue themselves to the road – a few bollards and a hi-vis tarpaulin to try to make sure nobody runs them over – then get the traffic moving around them. Similar for the M25 gantry protests – a quick net fixed underneath and then get the traffic moving again.
Activism is all well and good. If there is injustice that is clear by all means, We often hear the supporters of JSO and Extinction Rebellion etc compare them to the Suffragettes, but these people were protesting about rights for women and the vote. But it was crystal clear that women were not being allowed the vote. Climate Change being caused by the use of fossil fuels is not so clear. It is riddled with uncertainty and is always a question of degree. There has to be an evaluation of cost/benefit and the benefit of fossil fuels is clear. They have brought billions of people out of abject poverty, and this is the part of the equation that JSO etc simply do not accept, basically because they understand virtually nothing about how energy works. So we cannot have energy policy based on faith and emotion, and there comes a point where the activism goes too far all based on irrational fear. These climate activists are starting to go too far and they must be nipped in the bud before people get seriously hurt or worse.
The issue of votes for women was not at all clear. As late as 1917 many working class men did not have the vote either – it wasn’t just women who were not enfranchised. And much of the opposition to votes for women came from women themselves.
Judge Christopher Hehir…told the activists to come to court “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison…”
Many years ago, at a time when UK football hooliganism was world news, a taxi driver in Singapore took me on a tour, and drew up outside a large grim 19th-century brick building. It was Changi jail. ‘No hooliganism in Singapore,’ he stated with a proud air. ‘You get the cane here, you don’t sit down for six months.’
With our prisons full, and offenders undeterred by the thought of a little comfy custody at the public expense, maybe it’s time to look East and rediscover how we used to deal with juvenile delinquents. Maybe Judge Hehir should have told the soup-flingers to prepare not to sit down for 6 months.
We obviously need to heed their great wisdom and knowledge. They have shown us such great incites into the abyss the world is headed into if we do not stop using oil. So young to know so much. What really drives them is their narcissistic egos looking for attention and purpose. We can only hope they grow up some day, but living in their urban protected group think bubbles, there is doubt they will.