In September 2020, the Children’s Health Policy Centre at SFU published “COVID-19 and the Impact on Children’s Mental Health” to assist policymakers in assessing the social, educational and economic costs faced by B.C. children during the pandemic and in supporting children through mental health consequences. The findings report dramatic increases in rates of anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression and behavioural challenges compared to the general population of children, as well as disproportionate challenges in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. This report recommends providing additional necessary prevention and treatment services, ensuring public investments go towards effective interventions, preventing avoidable childhood adversities including by reducing socioeconomic disparities and tracking child outcomes.
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Recommendation 4: Finally, it is important to establish ongoing systems for monitoring mental health needs and outcomes for all children — to accurately depict the needs over time and to inform the evaluation of initiatives designed to meet these needs. Such efforts should focus first on problems that are expected to increase in the short term including anxiety, depression, behaviour problems and posttraumatic stress — in addition to tracking progress at addressing underlying issues such as socioeconomic disparities. Monitoring could take the form of pragmatic yet robust population-based short surveys conducted in representative samples of children. Our review also suggests that many children who experience mental health problems after disasters eventually recover. So tracking outcomes is also a way of measuring success.-
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