Tue May 3, 2022 – 7:49 pm EDT
(LifeSiteNews) — A newly published study found that an additional 60,000 adolescents in the U.K. experienced high levels of depression after the COVID-19 pandemic.
After controlling for “baseline scores and several school and pupil-level characteristics,” an analysis published last week in the Royal Society Open Science journal found that U.K. adolescents age 11 to 15 experienced significantly greater levels of depressive symptoms and lower levels of life satisfaction after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers found that post-pandemic, their sample had a 27.1 percent prevalence of “high depressive symptoms,” which Summit News reported amounted to an additional 60,000 children experiencing high levels of depression, according to the study’s metrics.
The journal defined high depressive symptoms using a 13-item self-report measure of depressive symptoms during the previous two weeks, with possible total scores ranging from 0 to 26, and higher scores indicating greater depression.
The study noted that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health problems were fairly common, with between 14 percent and 17 percent of adolescents age 11-19 meeting diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health disorder in England in 2017.
According to Summit News, 400,000 British children “were
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