COVID-19: The Mystery of Miseries in Students

COVID-19, an infectious contagious disease was discovered in Wuhan, China in 2019. In March 2019, it spread worldwide and WHO declared it as global pandemic. It not only affects the physical well-being of the people but also impacts negatively mental health due to fear, uncertainty, grief, social isolation and parental fatigue. During this dreadful condition, most vulnerable people were students. In a study, it shows that, prevalence rate of depression was 46.92% to 82.4%, anxiety was 26.6% to 96.82% and stress was 28.5% to 78.1% in students during COVID-19(Kurasaki et al., 2022) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35956231/

There are many factors which are responsible for these negative changes in mental health such as long term lock down, quarantine time, adjustment of new methods of academic activities like online classes and exams on online platform, inability to do physical exercises in open environment, socio economic disruption etc. 

Moreover, dissatisfaction of students in academic life during COVID-19 was one of the determinant of mental health problem. Besides, underprivileged students had to struggle academically due to online courses and financial crisis. To overcome these problems, many university offered average supports like tuition fee waiver, payment in instalment to continue the education. 

In addition, with study some students specially the university students have additional activity like supporting family members, assisting community, participating in social activity. All these activities were hampered due COVID-19. 

Moreover, there were session congestion at university level education during pre COVID period which became severe at the end of COVID-19. Even it was not possible to take HSC examination in 2020 due to severity of the COVID-19 and lock down. Therefore, students were auto passed which did not reflect the actual merit of those students. Later on, these students are still bullied because of auto pass and this negatively impacts their mental health.

The students of the rural area who faced a degraded internet network, worry of infection, disrupted carrier activity make them more vulnerable to mental health. Additionally, most severe symptoms were suicidal tendency due to depression and frustration due to job and carrier insecurity. 

In early stage, students specially the school going children were very much happy due to lockdown and enjoying their free time at home, which became monotonous. Therefore, frustration and depression developed among them. At home they spent their time highly active in mobile, computer, social media, television, playing games. Therefore, it negatively affected their mental health. To continue the study process, schools and colleges had to arrange their examinations on online. That’s why students did not take the examinations seriously and they were reluctant to study properly. Sometimes they did unfear means to pass the examinations. As a result, though they passed their examinations they were not mentally satisfied. According to a study of German University student, with the health risk there were increased rate of alcohol and drugs consumption and eating disorder symptoms. (Kohls et al.,2020) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.642689/full

Now to conclude, though the situation of the pandemic is in control, the people specially the students are still struggling to overcome the adverse effects of the pandemic. CODIV-19 has taught us how a pandemic like COVID-19 could be devastating throughout the world. We are so fortunate that people all over the world, whether it is from developed or developing countries, have taken necessary steps to eradicate the pandemic. Most importantly, we have gathered knowledge how we can take care of our mental health if any pandemic emerges in future.