These figures are stark, and should be setting off massive alarms at all levels of Irish society:
Pieta said it has seen a significant rise in the number of young people coming to them.
It said demand for services for under-18s has increased by over 40% since 2020.
From January to June of this year, the charity said almost a quarter of clients under 18 have attempted suicide, while 86% of under 18s have experienced suicidal ideation.
Depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and loneliness were the most common triggers for that age group.
Tom McEvoy, Funding and Advocacy Manager at Pieta said they have delivered over 8,000 hours of therapy over the last eight months to people 18 and under.
The easy explanation, and, of course, the most attractive one, if you are an anti-lockdowner like me, is “the lockdown”. But it is also easy and attractive because it is very obviously the correct explanation, or at least, the dominant one. When you shutter society in an unprecedented way, for months at a time, and take away people’s chances to socialise and meet other people, well, go figure that there will be an increase in feelings of loneliness, isolation, and alienation. It is the intuitive explanation. Ireland is particularly terrible at recording deaths by suicide, so it is impossible to say with certainty that there has been an increase over the last 18 months, but these figures would tend to back up the many anecdotal reports that suicides have, in fact, increased. Put figures like these together with the impact of shuttering various health screening services for months at a time, and there is a reasonable case to be made that lockdown may have cost – or at minimum, ruined – many more lives than it saved.
We shut down, remember, many things which are core to young people’s mental health: Team sports functionally ended for the guts of a year. Gyms were shuttered, affecting people’s ability to exercise. Pubs were closed. International travel was suspended. Many classes moved online.
Even today, many schools are not remotely close to being back to normal: Classes are staggered in many schools with rolling lunchbreaks, which makes it harder for young people to socialise with their friends for even half an hour in the day. Mask use is ubiquitous. Physical contact remains discouraged. The truth of the matter is that even today, the government places more value on the anxiety of the middle aged covid hyper cautious than it does on young people.
But lockdown is an easy and obvious target. It likely explains much, but not all. Note above that “low self esteem” is also a major issue. You can point to lockdown for loneliness, and anxiety. It’s harder to connect lockdown to “low self esteem”. For that, it is probably more relevant to look to social media, and the impact of pornography, and the immense pressure that young people feel to conform to an idealised version of themselves. Don’t believe me on that one, by the way – instagram’s own research suggests that the app makes body image issues worse for one in three young girls.
Put it all together, add in the housing crisis, the rise in anti-social behaviour (primarily amongst the young), and the constant media warnings that the world might not exist in 20 years due to climate change and other problems, and you have a country where it is just not very easy or enjoyable to be a young person. And it is not easy to point to a single answer that any of Ireland’s political parties have to their problems, beyond simplistic and symbolic ideas like giving the vote to 16 year olds.
What’s more, it is not as if all this damage can be simply undone. That is not how mental health works. There is no realistic prospect that the people damaged in Ireland over the past year and a half will just flip back to being happy, normal people once “covid is over”. We’ve inflicted all of this upon them at a critical point in their development into adults. You cannot just give back to young people the 18 months that we took away from them.
You may believe that the lockdown was necessary and justified. But it is increasingly hard to argue that it was anything other than a catastrophe for the country, and the people living in it.