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Worrying rates of anxiety and depression symptoms among high school youth.
According to a July 7, 2022 UdeM News article by Martin LaSalle
According to data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic from students in five Montreal high schools, adolescents report worrying manifestations of performance anxiety, generalized anxiety, social anxiety and depression.
However, anxiety related to COVID-19 appears to be less prevalent: of the 432 secondary 3 and 4 students who responded to a questionnaire in the years 2020 and 2021, only 6% reported being very anxious about the pandemic, while 19% reported being moderately anxious.
This is what emerges from research conducted by doctoral student Gabrielle Yale-Soulière, in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Professor Lyse Turgeon.
However, anxiety about COVID-19 is moderately associated with more pronounced symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety and social anxiety. There is also a weaker relationship between COVID-19 anxiety and academic performance, according to doctoral student Emmanuelle Ayotte, who also contributed to this study.
Symptoms of generalized anxiety, social anxiety and depression
In this study, 37% of students surveyed reported strong symptoms of generalized anxiety, while 46% had moderate symptoms.
Generalized anxiety is characterized by worries that are difficult to calm and is accompanied by symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, fatigue, muscle tension and sleep disturbances.
In addition, 32% of the young people surveyed said they felt a great deal of social anxiety, and the same proportion felt moderate anxiety.
One out of two students (52%) reported symptoms of depression, 26% of which were high and the rest moderate.
Finally, performance anxiety associated with academic performance was experienced markedly by 15% and moderately by 18% of respondents.
“Our results also indicate that the problems described above are about twice as common among girls as among boys. Moreover, the manifestations are most pronounced among students who do not identify with any gender,” says Gabrielle Yale-Soulière.
Academic performance anxiety: a poorly documented phenomenon
The preliminary results of this study are part of a larger research project led by Gabrielle Yale-Soulière and supervised by Lyse Turgeon. This project focuses on academic performance anxiety in high school students. It is among the first to examine the issues in Quebec.
“We wanted to identify tools that could help reduce performance anxiety in schools and we realized that this phenomenon is very poorly documented, so we oriented our study in this direction,” says Gabrielle Yale-Soulière.
However, there were many pitfalls. Indeed, the successive waves of COVID-19 forced the team to recruit participants from a distance.
We initially wanted to survey 2,000 students, but the pandemic overloaded our partners in the five schools,” says Dr. Goulière. Second, obtaining remote consent from the 581 parents involved was not easy.”
