MIND MATTERS: Lessons from past crises for child and adolescent mental health during COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis like no other in modern times. Its global ubiquity is unprecedented, leaving no population or community untouched. Its impact on our mental health, and that of children and adolescents, is still emerging but the available evidence suggests it is, and will be, marked. Given that the pandemic is just over a year old and its evidence base is therefore still nascent, looking at the impact of past crises on youth mental health is a useful means of providing insights that can guide policies and programmes to support their mental well-being. This report does just that. It represents the first of two volumes of rapid
syntheses on youth mental health by UNICEF Innocenti, with the second looking at the available evidence that has emerged largely over the past year.