Loneliness for Children & Young People During the Pandemic Let's Talk About CBT

 
What does existing research tell us about the possible impact of the pandemic on children and young people's mental health? Dr Lucy Maddox speaks with Dr Maria Loades about Maria and colleagues' recent rapid review of the literature on isolation and mental health, and what CBT principles suggest can be helpful to head off problems, in particular with loneliness during the pandemic. 
Show Notes and Transcript
Maria recommended lots of helpful resources on loneliness and social isolation which we've listed here:
Books
Together: Loneliness, Health And What Happens when we find Connection – Vivek Murthy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Together-Loneliness-Health-Happens-Connection/dp/1788162773
Overcoming social anxiety and shyness https://www.amazon.co.uk/Overcoming-Social-Anxiety-Shyness-Gillian/dp/1849010005
Overcoming your children’s social anxiety and shyness https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845290879/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_6p13EbZ0ER2XD
Websites
Mind - https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/tips-for-everyday-living/loneliness/about-loneliness/
How to cope with loneliness during coronavirus – https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-cope-with-loneliness-during-coronavirus-4799661
TEDx talk by Will Wright ‘Loneliness is literally killing us’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruh6rN5UrME&feature=youtu.be
Loneliness and isolation in teenagers – a parent’s guide https://www.bupa.co.uk/newsroom/ourviews/2019/05/teenager-loneliness
As always if you want more information on BABCP check out www.babcp.com
If you want to find a CBT accredited therapist check the register of BABCP accredited therapists https://www.cbtregisteruk.com/
Articles
The rapid review we talked about is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267797/
Podcast
That podcast episode with Shirley Reynolds on teenagers doing more of what matters to them is here: https://letstalkaboutcbt.libsyn.com/helping-teenagers-do-more-of-what-matters-to-them
 
Transcript

Lucy: Hi and welcome to Let’s Talk About CBT with me, Dr Lucy Maddox. In this episode brought to you by the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies, we think about the possible effects of quarantine on children and young people’s mental health. I’ll let my guest for today introduce herself.  

Maria: My name is Dr Maria Loades and I’m a clinical psychologist and I work at the University of Bath as a lecturer on the doctorate and clinical psychology programme.  

Lucy: Maria and her colleagues have been especially interested in the effects of the pandemic on children and young people. She co-authored a rapid review of evidence to try to understand what this effect is likely to be.  

Maria: What we wanted to do was to look at two things. One is the studies that have been done that have looked at social isolation in a pandemic context in children and young people and how that’s impacted on their mental health. Secondly, we were also interested in thinking, okay, if these measures mean that young people experience this increase in loneliness, what do we know about how loneliness might be related to mental health for children and young people.  

Lucy: So obviously there’s not loads of pandemics to study, but you’re trying to work out from what’s been done before, how does loneliness impact on mental health problems for children and young people? You turned the review around really quickly didn’t you, because normally it takes months to do something like this.  

Maria: Yes, we really felt like it was particularly important to pull this together as quickly as we could to inform policy and practice going forward.  

Lucy: And what did you find?  

Maria: As we expected, there isn’t much known about the impact of pandemics specifically. There was just one study that looked at mental health in children and young people in a pandemic context and it did find that there was significantly in