The Impact of Pandemic on Mental Health

EDWIN TUAZON TURLA

Mental health has been disregarded ever since before the pandemic began. It is a sensitive issue that is not widely talked about by people. It is some kind of diagnosis in terms of mental health wherein something is wrong in your brain or you are just overthinking things around you. People that undergo this kind of concern choose to zip their mouth being afraid of what people might think of them.

Through this pandemic, there’s a drastic growth of mental issues among youths. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), they estimated that 10 to 20 percent of children and adolescents suffer from various forms of mental disorders. Some signs are already visible at the age of 14 but the remaining age brackets remain unrecognized until it’s too late.

How does this Covid-19 pandemic greatly affect one's mind, especially the students? At first, everyone was excited about the cancellation of classes for a week. Everyone thought of this as some kind of academic break. But this became temporary happiness, things started to get worse. Guidelines for quarantine started to be implemented strictly. It made their usual activities limited at home only: talking with friends, doing projects, learning lessons, and eating out is no longer the same. Students are more physically active now online.

With a lot of things happening around them and the adjustment to the new classroom setup as well, it emerges into a mental health crisis. One of the things that our education system lacks is the ability to discuss mental health freely and the common signs of it. There were few reports showing how students easily gave up on themselves because of the pressure. Most of the teachers or professors nowadays demand higher passing rates, complete attendance, and students learning things quickly. It is understandable that their teaching objective is to produce competitive students despite of the pandemic, but they must also understand the situation that they are also undergoing changes of this new era and as much as they want to get back to normal, the risks are inevitable.

The stress and anxiety because of the pressure our education system has caused nowadays should not be highly disregarded. Instead of being one of the triggers for students, our system should be the first one to create an environment for students to talk about their thoughts. Our system should be the first to give them knowledge that they should not be consumed by their mind. Learning should be fun, beneficial, and a stepping stone towards achieving dreams. Learning should not be the reason for anxieties that might lead to scattered dreams. Mental health is not a joke.

*** ** at Madapdap Resettlement High School

The author is Master Teacher

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