After the Covid, young people experience an unprecedented wave of depression

“Lockdown has changed who I am“, summarizes with AFP Antoine, a 20-year-old student, who is continuing treatment with antidepressants three years after the start of the Covid-19 health crisis.

The young man – who does not wish to make his surname public – has experienced a situation in which many people of the same age can identify, as evidenced by a study published Tuesday by the French public health agency.

This work, carried out using questionnaires from around 25,000 randomly selected French people, measured the frequency of depressive episodes within the population in 2021.

For 20 years, similar studies have been carried out regularly in France, the previous one dating back to 2017. Between the last two, the Covid has been there, and cases of depression have experienced an unprecedented jump, a conclusion that goes in the direction other works already carried out abroad.

This increase affects the entire French population, but it is particularly the 18-24 year olds who are affected. Among them, the proportion of depressive episodes has almost doubled to reach about a fifth of those questioned.

On Monday, the main federal health agency of the United States, CDC, sounded the alarm in the face of very worrying figures concerning the mental health of high school students, in particular young girls. Nearly a third of them (30%) have seriously considered suicide in 2021 (compared to 19% in 2011).

“Stuck With”

Impossible, of course, to establish in each case a precise link of cause and effect between the Covid crisis and the onset of depression, especially since the causes of this disease always obey multiple factors, which range from the patient’s personal history to his physiology.

But, in general,the stress caused by the Covid-19 disease and the restrictions imposed to control it appears to be one of the main explanatory hypotheses for this increase“, judge the researchers of the French study.

For Antoine, it was indeed the first confinement, decreed in France in March 2020 and particularly strict, which played a role in the worsening of his mental state. The young man was already experiencing typical symptoms of depression – unexplained crying, suicidal thoughts – but they reached an intolerable intensity when he found himself almost completely unable to leave his parents’ home in Nice.

“My symptoms, I left them at home“, he summarizes. “With the confinement, I found myself stuck with“.

Above all, there was no turning back when the confinement ended: the depression persisted and, if the young man feels better today, he still fears a further worsening of his condition.

“Lockdown was like a transition from one state to another“, notes Antoine, whose mental situation has also been weighed down by the difficulty of starting studies in the fall of 2020, in a context marked by the closure of French universities and the generalization of distance learning.

“It can’t be made up for”

Antoine’s disease also obeys individual springs. But it resonates with the study published on Tuesday, illustrating how the Covid crisis and the restrictions imposed have had a particular psychological impact on the youngest, and how this effect is likely to last.

“What played a lot was the uncertainty about the future, which has a very important dimension at that age: will I get my diploma? will I be able to follow the courses?“, advances Enguerrand du Roscoat, who co-signed the study and specializes in mental health issues within Public Health France.

He also points to the feeling of irreversibility: “What you experience between the ages of 18 and 24 are things that cannot be made up for a priori“.

The researcher also puts forward other hypotheses: financial precariousness, isolation in often tiny accommodation, as well as a form of guilt in the face of the epidemic. “Young people have been shown a little as wanting to go out, contaminating themselves more and potentially constituting a danger“, notes Mr. Roscoat.