During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people were affected by social distress and anxiety. The anxiety was due to people’s little knowledge about the pandemic. Covid-19 was very scary and is still to date (Keating, 2021). That is due to its dangers. It is true to say that many people had started developing anxiety issues even before the pandemic. Young people had many instances of depression due to the stages that they underwent in life. When young men hit the age of adulthood, they often become stressed due to the expectations that have been put on their shoulders. There were no expectations during the Covid-19 pandemic. All that existed were young men who were very scared of getting the virus. Plenty of factors made it difficult for young men to be in a good state of mind during the pandemic (Keating, 2021). The majority of the factors were society related, while some of them depended on the nature of communication that existed. The stigmatization that exists in society is among the major factors that lead to instability among young people (Jiang, 2021). It is, therefore, to say that both social media and societal crises caused the mental health crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A good look at the stressors that were experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic brings out that some of them were societal in nature. The societal factors that caused depression among young people included societal discrimination. There was massive discrimination and victim blaming. Victim blaming occurred because people who had the virus were being blamed by their counterparts who did not have the virus (Keating, 2021). Victim blaming made people less resilient. The people could not become resilient since all their efforts were being suppressed by the victimization that was channeled towards them. Social media also played an important role in increasing the stress levels of the victims. Social media increased the stress levels of the victims since that is where most of them were being laughed at. Social media made it easy for negative comments to be experienced in many parts of the world (Muzi, Sansò & Pace, 2021). It made it easy for many people from different parts of the world to post negative information on the pandemic. That made the people who had the virus go through a lot of mental torture. Some of the cases of death were also caused by the mental torture that the victims underwent. The mental tortures made them feel that there would not get better.
Students from universities and high schools were the ones who were affected the most by the pandemic. These students got most of their harm from social media. Social media was used as a tool for mass oppression. There are different players who are fond of spreading false news. Such false news impacts people negatively (Muzi, Sansò & Pace, 2021). There are instances where some leaders went to the extent of calling the pandemic “the Chinese virus.” Different students became aware of such terms and decided to use them to mock their friends who came from Asian countries. That was very harmful to the well-being of the students. Zoom sessions were worse since everyone saw those students who came from China and its neighboring countries as the carriers of the pandemic (Muzi, Sansò & Pace, 2021). Some people even went to the extent of mocking the type of food that the Chinese people eat while saying that their diet choice led to the pandemic. That was of great harm to the student. The adolescent crisis, together with the negative use of social media, caused a lot of massive damage (Jiang, 2021). There is no way students would stop using social media since it would lead to them being lonely. That would also lead to depression. Thus, the anxiety and depression experienced among the youth during the Covid-19 pandemic were caused by wrong uses of social media and societal factors.
References
Jiang, Y. (2021). Problematic social media usage and anxiety among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of academic burnout. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 612007.
Keating, D. (2021). The Youth Stress Pandemic: Social Distress, Not Social Media. Retrieved 25 August 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/stressful-lives/202207/the-youth-stress-pandemic-social-distress-not-social-media
Muzi, S., Sansò, A., & Pace, C. S. (2021). What’s happened to Italian adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic? A preliminary study on symptoms, problematic social media usage, and attachment: relationships and differences with pre-pandemic peers. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 590543.
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