Five Years Later, Pandemic Teens are Still Dealing with Trauma

It’s 2020. You’re 13 years old and in the seventh grade. Everyone is hooked on the nascent TikTok app and you’re dead set on learning the new “Renegade” dance. Charli D’Amelio is in, VSCO girls are out.

You walk into your lunchroom one day to find that the main topic of conversation around your usual table isn’t about social media at all but some new “coronavirus” that some folks say might become a terrifying pandemic.

You don’t know what a coronavirus is yet, but you know a compound word when you hear it and the second part of this one is all the context you need.

One day in the lead-up to spring, March 13 to be exact, your teachers hand you a bunch of paperwork and HP Chromebooks to take home with instructions to login for the next two weeks. The coronavirus has caused a two-week lockdown for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and all public schools across North Carolina.

You think to yourself, “Okay, strange, whatever.” Two weeks of not having to come to school? Who could be mad about that?

You go home and for the next two weeks you log in for online school, scroll the endless rabbit holes of TikTok nonstop, learn new dances, watching the new Tiger King series on Netflix, learn “The Carol Baskin Song,” and life is amazing.

Fast forward two more weeks, the lockdown has been extended for another month. That’s fine. A longer vacation? Yay!

As your initial excitement fades, boredom sets in. Online school is still school. Your grades aren’t on vacation, the end of the year exams are creeping closer and everything is just left hanging up in the air.

You struggle through math class, trying to figure out how you’re supposed to grasp the concept of algebraic reasoning through a computer screen. Your teachers struggle to continue as if everything is normal when in reality, life as we knew it has been flipped upside down.

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Your day of online school ends, you switch on the news and see the ticker in the corner of the screen shockingly higher than it was this morning. Three-hundred more people die in the time between the time you log in to Zoom for a single class and the time you log out.

A weird anxiety forms a hole in the pit of your stomach. You turn the TV off and FaceTime your friends. You’re on a group call with two other girls, but one of them says she can’t talk for long. You can tell she’s downcast despite the fact that she’s wearing a mask in her own home so she can regularly check on her grandmother, who’s fallen ill. Meanwhile, your other friend is quarantined from her entire family because she’s been exposed to the virus.

You sigh, looking forward to next month when the lockdown will supposedly be lifted. That date, however, will continue to be pushed further and further into the future. Normalcy will prove to be as evasive as the principles behind algebraic reasoning.

The world as a whole has gone through this pandemic together, but as a rising college freshman whose lived experience mirrors the story I’ve recounted above, I can’t help but wonder about the impacts of the pandemic on teens and ‘tweens like me, those who spent the prime of their formative years — years that are crucial for forming communication skills, building identity and creating lifelong connections — dealing with an unprecedented international pandemic.

With a new school year beginning in North Carolina five years after the start of the 2020-21 school year was delayed due to continued lockdowns, many who were entering their teens during the pandemic are now entering college, offering a new breath of life not plagued by the potential for worldwide disaster that has subconsciously loomed over my generation.

What exactly are the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students like myself and how have they lingered on? How have the hardships endured during the pandemic shaped our identities and mental struggles?

I recently spoke to a number of young people to get their take on those seemingly unanswerable questions. But first, let’s zoom out.

What do the numbers say?

Nationally, there is already a plethora of evidence to show just how detrimental the pandemic has been to adolescent mental health.

A National Institute of Mental Health study from 2023 showed that the pandemic has caused worse mental health issues and accelerated aging in brain development among adolescents as compared to their predecessors.

Two groups of adolescents were analyzed – one group that was assessed before the pandemic and another that was assessed post-lockdown. The post-lockdown group showed a thinning in the part of their brain that helps contribute to things like self control and planning. In large part, their brains resembled those who have gone through extreme childhood adversity or even grown adults under major amounts of stress.

The study also found that members of the post-shutdown group had older brain ages than the pre-shutdown group.

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In North Carolina, statistics from a Bright Path Behavioral Health study published in 2021 found that 22% of NC high school students contemplated attempting suicide in that year and more than 10% of NC high school students had actually attempted suicide, a 23% increase from 2017.

The Bright Path study also found that, from 2019 to 2021, the risk of teenagers experiencing one or more major depressive episodes increased by 46%.

Violence in North Carolina schools increased as well. A report from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction stated that, “Data included in North Carolina’s annual Consolidated Data Report to the General Assembly … shows an overall increase in crime and violence during the 2021-22 school year when compared to years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

These statistics are only part of the story.

Hearing from those who lived it

Sarah McLaughlin was 11 years old when the pandemic began. She is now 16 years old and a student at Central Piedmont Early College.

McLaughlin didn’t consider herself to be largely affected by the outbreak at its onset because she was living in a low-transmission area. After moving to Charlotte in 2021, however, she began noticing the toll the pandemic was taking on her.

At 12 years old, McLaughlin began struggling with depression. Even before moving, she noticed that “everyone had become afraid of each other,” making her feel as if people were “treating each other like they themselves were COVID,” she explained.

“Nobody knew when the pandemic would end, which means I never knew when people would stop treating me like a disease,” she told me.

McLaughlin struggled with severe mental health crises directly tied to the pandemic. “Around this time is when the thoughts of self-harm and suicide began,” she said.

As time went on, McLaughlin continued to struggle with feelings of depression, which escalated until she was able to access the help she needed.

“The pandemic showed me that not everything is permanent,” she said.

I spoke to scores of students with similar stories to McLaughlin’s.

Now an 18-year-old nursing student at Central Piedmont Community College, Natalie Tuju was 13 years old when the pandemic began.

Tuju detailed how, though at first she thought it was just “normal pandemic blues” and figured everyone our age was going through the same thing, as time went on the symptoms of her mental health struggles became more noticeable.

“I feel as though being ripped away from seventh grade, which is a very crucial time to finding who you are, and then being ripped away halfway through the year and doing the entire eighth grade online, it felt like my entire middle school experience was ripped away from me.” she said.

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Tuju spoke specifically about how the isolation of the pandemic impacted her decisions and overall mood, with the isolation increasing her anxiety and a sense of restlessness.

“Then high school rolls around and we’re all supposed to be like, ‘Yay, high school!’ she recalled. “But in reality we are all still struggling from the aftershocks of the pandemic.”

The start of high school did not bring Tuju any relief but instead introduced a new slate of social and emotional struggles.

“Now I’m an adult and high school went by so fast, but I still sometimes feel like I’m not where I should be developmentally, emotionally, socially,” she said. “It just feels like I’m held back.”

Mental health professionals see a shift

Professionals have also noticed these impacts in their clients, with some having experienced the effects themselves.

Ebube Bobby-Tasie is a certified therapist practicing at Tamarasa Therapy in Durham. She was a college student during the onset of the pandemic.

“We all felt the isolation of virtual life, the prioritization of physical health over mental health and the anxiety of an abruptly changing world,” she said. “While my experience was different from that of a high schooler, the sense of uncertainty and depression was universal.”

After becoming a practicing clinician in September 2024, Bobby-Tasie said she immediately began to recognize the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had made on her younger clients.

“The lack of socialization during the pandemic had a delayed but profound impact on children and adolescents. I’ve seen an increase in mood and behavioral disorders that continue today,” she said. “For some, the pandemic was a traumatic experience — and the way each developing mind processes that trauma is unique.”

She said she has seen teens who developed intense anxiety, hypervigilance and even obsessive behaviors to avoid getting sick.

“Many were essentially socialized through the internet and now struggle with in-person connection,” she described. “Adults, too, have been affected — feeling disconnected, losing hope and carrying compassion fatigue.”

Bobby-Tasie said she believes that children and adolescents missed critical social experiences that help shape autonomy, self-assurance, identity and belonging during the pandemic, leaving effects that will ripple forward, affecting how they connect and function as adults.

“The pandemic didn’t affect everyone equally,” she explained. “Minorities, low-income families and helping professionals often faced additional burdens, from lack of access to resources to burnout that changed the way they could show up for others.”

A group of adolescents that may have experienced effects from the pandemic differently were student athletes, who have the unique experience of finding a family in their teams, dedicating extra time to improve their craft and training constantly.

La’Tracia Jones is owner and founder of Pursuing Peace, PLLC, a private mental health intervention and prevention practice based in Charlotte. She is also a licensed clinical social worker at the practice.

Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from NC A&T University in 2011. She has been in the mental health profession since 2014, with a focus on helping adolescents and specifically student athletes.

Jones stated that the pandemic brought an “undeniable shift” in the adolescents she serves.

“The pandemic amplified feelings of isolation, anxiety and uncertainty,” Jones says. “You had athletes who suddenly lost entire seasons. Imagine playing every fall or spring for years, and then without warning, your final season is just gone.”

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Jones believes the effects went beyond depression or anxiety and disrupted the formation of an identity for many young people.

“That loss, it can really disrupt who you are because many athletes struggle with their identity outside of the sport that they are playing,” she said. “So during that time, you had athletes experiencing identity crisis.”

Despite these disruptions, Jones remains hopeful that the shock of it all can be soothed over as the affected adolescents enter college and become working and functioning adults.

“I think recovery for them is going to happen when they get to college and when they start their careers because when we are in school or working in our careers we are forced to learn how to communicate and they seem the most uncomfortable with communication and connectedness,” she said.

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We have passed the five-year mark since COVID-19 clamped down on America, closing schools throughout the country and causing what Jones described as an “undeniable shift” in young people. The lockdowns might be over, but those who were adolescents during that time are still navigating the aftershocks and figuring out how to rebuild the parts of themselves that were lost in that time.

It’s important to continue to circle back to the pandemic and look into the ways it impacted the behaviors and struggles of this specific age group in the years to come as we enter college and the working population.

As time goes on, the impacts of the pandemic on this specific group will perhaps be forgotten or they will manifest in unforeseeable ways, but it will remain a fresh memory for those who of us who went through it.