Linley Valley Dr 2

The speaker, a primary care nurse practitioner, shares observations about the mental health of children and adolescents during COVID. They noticed an increase in anxiety and separation anxiety among younger children, social anxiety among older elementary school kids, and depression among teenagers. Some children required medication for their mental health issues. The speaker also mentions that exposure to social situations and gradual reintroduction to activities helped improve the children's well-being. You already did that. Yeah, I gave you like an introduction. Okay, I am here with my mom, Dana, and she is just going to tell us a little bit of what she observed among children and adolescents during COVID. Thank you, Sage. Yes, so I am a primary care nurse practitioner that works in a rural nursing station or a health hub that we call it, which is a satellite site of a family health team in the Muskoka area. I work in a indigenous community and also look after indigenous and non-indigenous patients from our catchment area. In COVID, I saw the younger children, probably from zero to five, have a lot of increase in anxiety, a lot of separation anxiety. So even over the last couple of years when school did start or extra activities started, they did not want to leave their parents. They had anxiety when they were at school. They had to be picked up at school. So there was a lot of increase in separation anxiety that we really didn't see prior to COVID. Prior to COVID, we might have a couple of kids that will have separation anxiety, but this was like a whole cohort that we saw that in. And then probably the older elementary school kids to about grade six, we saw anxiety, not necessarily separation anxiety, but we saw social anxiety. So having to communicate with other people, having to be close and connect with other people, there was a decrease in those skills, communication skills. And they were just afraid and had fear of starting relationships with other children. And I continue to see that today, actually. It might be getting a little bit better if the parents made a effort to expose their children to social situations after and kind of slowly sort of worked into more activities for the child than that child fared better. In the teenage, probably later elementary, so grade eight, seven, eight into high school, I saw some social anxiety, but mostly depression. So depression really had increased. The children would report, of course, just like a lot of the adults, loneliness and separation from friends, not being able to see their friends face-to-face. And this caused a lot of depression. I'm still seeing a fair amount of depression now. And some children requiring medication because of this. And also there was a little bit of social anxiety, too, where teens that already had some social anxiety, it was exacerbated during COVID when they got to stay at home by themselves. They were probably a little bit, they liked it. And then when they had to go back, that social anxiety kicked up. So that's kind of what I saw in children, mental health. That's awesome, okay. Does that sound good? Yeah, thank you so much, mom. Well, thank you very much, Sage. See you at Christmas. Bye. Bye.