Changes in youth mental health, psychological wellbeing, and substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The focus of this review was to assess changes in youth mental health, psychological wellbeing, or substance use, as well as changes or disruptions to the delivery of mental health or substance use services for young people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: We conducted a rapid review of the literature on our outcomes of interest among youth (age <=25) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Primary studies and systematic reviews on change were eligible for inclusion. Searches were conducted in PubMed and Embase in May 2021, and two reviewers screened studies for inclusion. We report results using a narrative synthesis.Results: We included 156 primary publications. A variety of methods were used to assess change, including prospective assessment of longitudinal cohorts, retrospective recall by participants in cross-sectional and qualitative studies, and comparison of peri-pandemic data to pre-pandemic normative values. Publications regarding mental health (n = 121) and psychological wellbeing (n = 26) generally indicated poor outcomes during the pandemic period. Publications on substance use (n = 41) revealed overall declines or unchanged patterns of use, though certain groups reported increased or problematic use. Studies of service delivery (n = 11) indicated a generally positive reception for helplines and telehealth, although some youth experienced difficulties accessing mental health services. Conclusions: The evidence indicates negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people’s mental health, although declines in alcohol and nicotine use were also found. Services will need to continue to adapt as the pandemic progresses, particularly to support disadvantaged youth who lack access to telehealth resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".