“When, upon entering schools, we asked children and families what kind of impact in terms of loneliness, anxiety and depression they had experienced during the pandemic, 60% of adolescents responded that they felt alone, compared to 40% of parents. Not only that: 44.6% of those under 37 and even 49.4% of young people between 18 and 25 say they suffer from anxiety and depression, compared to 23% of parents. During the pandemic we were all a bit overwhelmed, but young people have suffered more. For teenagers the health emergency with the inevitable interruption of everyday life, of normality, of the life that we have all tried to fill, has meant only one thing: the worsening of this isolation which is already problematic enough when it happens in adolescence and which for many has also become worse because there are cases of agoraphobia”. Thus at Adnkronos Salute Ketty Vaccaro, head of Health and Welfare at Censis, on the sidelines of the presentation – today in Rome – of the ‘Do you see me?’ project, promoted in schools by Lundbeck Italia in collaboration with Your Business Partner, with the aim of listening adolescents and respond to their unexpressed needs.
“In the post-pandemic period, the percentages of young people who declare that they are experiencing uncomfortable situations, that they no longer want to leave the house, that they feel alone and more fragile fluctuate between 44.6% and 49%. Therefore a longer impact period which in my opinion defines a sort of hidden vulnerability, the result of the pandemic, but which continues, which drags on. And this is another thing that we adults don’t understand”, underlines Vaccaro. But “what is striking and what emerges from the Do you see me? project is the underestimation”, the discrepancy “between the problems that children say they have and what parents and teachers perceive. No one is able to grasp the specific difficulties of adolescents. And then the other thing that emerges is the buck-passing. The kids say that the cause of their discomfort is the family, the teachers say it’s the family’s fault, the school’s parents. We look after our children a lot, but we talk to each other a lot less than we should.”
A separate chapter, for Vaccaro, are the children who were at the beginning of primary school in the midst of a health emergency. “We still don’t know anything about them. Unlike adolescents, they are unable to express discomfort. In a few years we will find out”, he concludes.
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