UK: Lockdowns Hit Teenage Boys’ Mental Health Hardest and They Haven’t Recovered, Study Finds

Oh man, this goon toon really sucks.

It’s a good thing no one gives a shit about boys, or this would be a serious problem.

The Guardian:

Teenage boys were hit hardest by the Covid lockdowns, with their mental health failing to recover despite the return to normality, according to the most comprehensive academic study of its kind.

Early research into how lockdown affected children indicated that girls had suffered more significant mental health problems than boys.

(That would always be what they would tell you, regardless. Women literally have zero struggle in their life, and yet we’re constantly hearing about how hard everything is for them.)

However, a new study carried out by academics from three UK universities, published in the journal European Child + Adolescent Psychiatry, found that over the long term, teenage boys’ mental health was more adversely affected.

The research followed a cohort of about 200 children, aged between 11 and 14 at the time, asking them and their mothers to assess their mental state. It logged data from each child before lockdown, three months after the measures started and again at 15 months into the pandemic.

Researchers then compared this data with historical records that show the usual pattern of mental wellbeing for boys and girls during adolescence.

The academics found that while both sexes had an immediate decline in their mental health, boys then did not experience the natural improvement in mental wellbeing that usually comes with maturation as they move through the teenage years.

Does that happen for teenage boys? I’ve never heard of that. My life has just gotten shittier and shittier every day since I was born.

When I saw that goon toon at the top of this article, I said: “Yep. yet another ‘worst day of my life.'”

Dr Nicky Wright, a lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University and a co-author of the paper, said: “The key message of this is that we expect more boys to be at risk of mental health problems now than we would before [the pandemic].

Girls, on average, are more likely to suffer with mental health problems than boys. But the girls in the study followed their usual pattern, suggesting the experience of lockdown had a more significant impact on boys than girls.

There wasn’t a pandemic effect on girls’ depression. When you account for puberty and development, it’s consistent with previous trends,” said Wright.

In south London, Dr Jen Wills Lamacq, a child psychologist who works in state schools, said she has seen the pandemic effect on boys’ mental health first-hand, including increased difficult behaviour. She believes the decline in young male mental health was triggered by the rupture to their lives at a crucial point in adolescent development.

“Lots of boys, to regulate their emotions, may want to be outside, doing something active and around other people, without necessarily talking. For long periods of time, they were deprived of opportunities to regulate their mental wellbeing in a way that comes naturally to them,” she said.

Yeah, all these kids are going to have brain damage.

I said that during the first phase of the hoax – that it was just going to totally destroy an entire generation of people, psychologically. Young people were already a bunch of pansy faggots. The zoomers you see at work and just out in society are pathetic babies. When one of them makes a comment about women, you’re like “wait, what? I thought you were gay!” I have not recently met a Western white man under the age of 25 who I did not immediately assume was gay.

It’s going to be much worse in a few years.


Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article.