Young people were hit hard by the pandemic’s restrictions, not least mentally. But in the years following the pandemic, little is known about how they are doing now. To explore the long-term effects in the post-pandemic Nordic region, Forte and other Nordic funding councils have funded eight research projects in 2023.

Agnieszka Butwicka, Principal Researcher and project leader

One such project, led by Agnieszka Butwicka at Karolinska Institutet, aims to improve the well-being of young people by increasing our understanding of how vulnerabilities and resilience determine post-pandemic outcomes in the Nordic countries. The research group has now published its first results from a cross-sectional, population-based study on mental health among Finnish youth following the COVID-19 pandemic. The study reveals that youth in Finland haven’t fully recovered from the adverse experiences during the COVID pandemic. The proportion of young people with anxiety, depression and social anxiety symptoms increased from pre-COVID-19 levels in 2021 and remained at these higher levels in 2023 among all study groups. Loneliness was the only parameter that showed improvement in all groups in 2023.

The researchers had anticipated that mental health issues would decline as the pandemic’s effects waned, but the data reveal that these problems persisted, contrary to their expectations. The results suggest that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health can be long-lasting.

The findings have been published in the Lancet psychiatry, issue 6, June 2024: Mental health after the COVID-19 pandemic among Finnish youth: a repeated, cross-sectional, population-based study

This article summarises a news piece originally published by NordForsk: High number of young people with mental health problems . NordForsk also served as the coordinating organisation for the call.