Ontario COVID-19 and Kids’ Mental Health Study
Photo: The Ontario COVID-19 and Kids' Mental Health Study Team
Dr. Daphne Korczak and her team from the Department of Psychiatry at The Hospital for Sick Children, and members of the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children, provide an update on their COVID-19 Canadian children, youth and families’ study.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread societal and school closures in Ontario led to concern among child health and mental health experts about the potential impacts of these public health restrictions on children, youth, and families. There was an urgent need for data to understand how public health emergency measures were affecting the mental health of children and youth, and to guide future public health decision-making. With seed funding from the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children and the Gary Hurvitz Centre for Brain and Mental Health, four leading SickKids’ research teams came together for the first time to tackle this data gap in real-time. Led by Dr. Korczak (Department of Psychiatry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine and The Hospital for Sick Children), this collaboration of four cohorts of children with and without previous mental health problems quickly established a data platform and built the infrastructure needed to understand how more than 2,700 children, youth, and parents were being impacted by the pandemic with respect to their mental health.
The initial seed funding allowed Dr. Korczak and the research team to quickly establish this program of research and successfully secure additional external funding from CIHR (3 awards) and the Ontario Ministry of Health. Findings from this research have been highly impactful and widely disseminated: 11 scientific articles have been either published (in JAMA Network Open, Eur Child Adolesc Psych, Current Psychology, BMJ Open, among others) or currently under review in peer-reviewed journals; results have been presented at >20 invited lectures to scientific, clinical, or community audiences, including to the Ontario COVID-19 Science Table, and have been the subject of >55 media interviews or stories on national and international radio shows (e.g., CBC Metro Morning, broadcasted internationally; CBC morning; Globe and Mail feature story; Toronto Star front page story). The study findings have also made important contributions to policy, and have informed policy briefs including the Ontario Ministry of Education Return to School guidelines and both provincial and national advocacy efforts to address the mental health needs of children during the COVID pandemic.
Through this research, we learned that the majority of children and adolescents’ mental health deteriorated with the onset of the pandemic, that social isolation as a result of school closures, activity cancellations, and lack of in-person interactions were the driving force of these effects, and that increased screen time, including spent online for school, was associated with increased symptoms of mental health problems.
The effects of the pandemic for children and youth have not ended.
The study is one of only a handful worldwide to follow children and families in real-time over several time points over the last three years. In the study’s next phase, the team will continue to examine important questions about how individual, family, and environmental (for example, school) factors interact to effect children’s mental health, and how and where interventions might be most effective.