Adolescent mental health during covid-19 pandemics: a systematic review

Int J Adolesc Med Health. 2022 Nov 2;35(1):41-60. doi: 10.1515/ijamh-2022-0058. eCollection 2023 Feb 1.

Abstract

Objectives: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging outcomes on adolescents' well-being. However, less attention has been paid to the adolescent's mental health during the pandemic. The pandemic may impair adolescents' mental health through stress spillover from other family members, contextual and policy changes, and the disruption of everyday life routines. Therefore, our research is motivated by a need to address the relative scarcity of research examining adolescent mental health during the pandemic.

Content: This systematic review was conducted through the medical database, Web of Science, Scopus, Medline, Embase, Google Scholar, and Cochrane databases for peer-reviewed, cross-sectional, cohort studies assessing the mental health status of adolescents during the Covid-19 virus pandemic from May 2020 till Dec 2022 without language restriction. Keywords were selected based on the Mesh terms and Emtree.

Summary: Studies on coronavirus have revealed many significant psychological effects on teens of all ages. The most commom problems were on the stress and anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder. Risk factors were concidered as prior mental health problem, female sexuality, fear of covid-19, nutrition, physical activity and listening the covid 19 news.

Outlook: Considering the critical age of teenagers, the role of parents is vital. Health policy maker should support parents as a key factors to approprate care for adolescent. Parents should be educated on parenting methods during the covid pandemic to avoid irreparable damage of adolescent's mental health.

Keywords: adolescent health; covid-19 pandemic; mental health.

Publication types

  • Systematic Review
  • Review

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Anxiety / epidemiology
  • Anxiety / psychology
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Cross-Sectional Studies
  • Depression / epidemiology
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Mental Health
  • Pandemics
  • Parenting