Title: Despair Deepens for Young People as Pandemic Drags On - The New York Times
Headings: ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On
‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On
A sense of limbo
‘Loneliness brings them into despair’
A search for remedies
Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Content: “The pandemic feels like a big stop in our lives,” she added. “ One that puts us so low that I wonder, ‘What’s the point?’” With curfews, closures and lockdowns in European countries set to drag into the spring or even the summer, mental health professionals are growing increasingly alarmed about the deteriorating mental state of young people, who they say have been among the most badly affected by a world with a foreshortened sense of the future. Last in line for vaccines and with schools and universities shuttered, young people have borne much of the burden of the sacrifices being made largely to protect older people, who are more at risk from severe infections. But the resilience of youth may be overestimated, mental health professionals say. Faced with a restricted social life and added uncertainty at an already precarious moment in their lives, many young people are suffering from a gnawing sense that they are losing precious time in their prime years. Across the world, they have lost economic opportunities, missed traditional milestones and forfeited relationships at a pivotal time for forming identity. “Many feel they’re paying the price not of the pandemic, but of the measures taken against the pandemic,” said Dr. Nicolas Franck, the head of a psychiatric network in Lyon, France. In a survey of 30,000 people that he conducted last spring, young people ranked the lowest in psychological well-being, he said. In Italy and in the Netherlands, some youth psychiatry wards have filled to record capacity.