Pandemic delivers emotional gut-punch to students

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This article was published 25/05/2020 (2020 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The pandemic has made for a bleak end to the winter term for Canada’s two million post-secondary students. However, what is of greater concern is the crushing weight that an even more uncertain future is placing on our students’ mental health.

As The New Yorker put it recently, “Young people think of college as an investment in their future. Now that future is changing in ways they can’t apprehend.”

Yet even before the coronavirus upended the world, acquiring post-secondary education in Canada had become a pressure cooker. The National College Health Assessment, a regular research survey into the health and lifestyle habits of more than 55,000 Canadian post-secondary students, released its latest data last spring. The findings were grim.

In their responses, one-third of students said anxiety had derailed their academic performance within the last two weeks; a quarter said the same for depression. When considering the same question over the course of a year, both these figures spiked to include over 90 per cent of respondents. Meanwhile, one in 10 students had intentionally self-harmed within the past 12 months, and 16 per cent of students reported that they had seriously considered suicide.

This student mental-health crisis stems partly from labour-market shifts that have occurred over the past two decades, placing constraints on youthful ambitions: the changing nature of work, a rise in automation — which opportunists will now fast-track — and creeping credentialism. Rather than post-secondary training being one of several career paths, it’s now a prerequisite for upward social mobility.

Getting into desired programs has also never been so costly: the average undergraduate in Canada today exits university with more than $28,000 in debt.

In addition, Generation Z is brutally aware of how their lives are inherently restricted, due to astronomical housing prices and a shortage of stable career opportunities. Through no fault of their own, students also know they await a horror-show future due to the world’s apparent inability to rein in runaway climate change.

Given this noxious mix of financial distress, delayed adulthood and looming climate dystopia, it’s no wonder the mental health of students was already fraying well before the coronavirus threw their individual and collective futures into flux. But their success in navigating a hasty shift to online learning — which is, very likely, here to stay — amid a multiple wave pandemic should matter to us all.

Undergraduates tend to be 18 to 24 years old, the same age window in which mental illness is most likely to first appear. By age 40, one in two Canadians will have, or have had, mental illness. Helping students acquire coping strategies now to deal with mental-health issues down the line will reduce preventable strain on our health-care system in the future, and lessen the $50 billion in productivity losses Canada suffers every year due to anxiety and depression alone.

Also to be considered is how, on top of the immediate need for skilled labour to help drag the Canadian economy out of its induced coma, our national labour replacement rate is dwindling. By 2030, nearly one-quarter of the population will be seniors; by 2035, the government predicts, there will only be two workers for every retiree in Canada, compared with seven workers per retiree in the 1970s.

The higher costs of caring for an aging society will fall upon a smaller taxpayer base.

With the country at a tipping point of massive demographic change, Canadians’ shared prosperity in our new COVID-19 reality will rely upon current students’ potential and ingenuity as business leaders, entrepreneurs, IT professionals, public servants and educators. Current students also represent our next wave of doctors, nurses, community health workers and epidemiologists, all of whom will be tasked with guiding us through subsequent pandemics that are nearly assured.

The good news is that there are accessible solutions available.

Smartphone apps, while not perfect, have greatly improved as supplemental treatments for mild depression and anxiety. Peer counselling programs are cost-effective ways to enlist student volunteers to support other students after first receiving training from professional counsellors. Updating counselling intake procedures can also improve access to treatment.

By doing so, both the University of Saskatchewan and University of Manitoba were able to increase their number of intake appointments by more than 60 per cent.

The pandemic is forcing a major rethink of many aspects of our society. High up on the list should be ensuring the mental health of post-secondary students as our society moves forward. We need to help them through this pandemic, because we will all be depending on them when the next one hits.

Kyle Hiebert is the strategy and research adviser for the University of Manitoba Students’ Union and a former editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.