Current Psychiatry Reports https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-025-01587-8
REVIEW
The Fallout of the COVID‑19 Pandemic on College Students Brunhild Kring1 · Ludmila de Faria2 · Alexandra Ackerman3 · Meera Menon4 · Francesco Peluso5 · with the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, College Student Committee Accepted: 28 January 2025 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025
Abstract Purpose of Review We examine the deleterious effects on emotional development and mental health of college students wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the era of climate change, political polarization, and global pandemics, some students are likely exposed to public disasters either on campus or at home at any given time. Recent Findings The worsening incidence and severity of mental health symptoms foreshadowed a youth mental health crisis of unanticipated proportions. Summary Post disaster, the treatment of physical illness typically takes precedence to the exclusion of preventive mental health measures. Even though the mental health effects of mass trauma are more pervasive and last longer than physical symptoms, mental health experts did not have a prominent place at the table of the COVID-19 response teams beyond their traditional role in the care of individual students. We conclude with a review of best practices for psychological first aid, and highlight the need for disaster response training for psychiatrists Keywords College students · COVID-19 · Disaster psychiatry · Youth mental health crisis · Transitional age youth · Emotional development of young adults
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has been named a massive trauma for our society, but segments of the population have been particularly vulnerable: these were the elderly who bore the highest risk for medical complications, the economically disadvantaged who lost their jobs and the young who missed
* Brunhild Kring brunhild.kring@nyu.edu 1
Student Health Center, Counseling and Wellness Services, Department of Psychiatry, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
2
Director of Residency Training, Department of Psychiatry, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
3
Private Practice, Department of Psychiatry, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
4
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, The Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, OH, USA
5
Yale Health, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
out on effective learning and social connection with peers [1]. Multiple studies emphasize that the unimaginable loss of life for families, economic devastation of communities, uncertainty about the future and the repeated unpredictable virus surges took an especially heavy emotional toll on the young [2]. Such highly stressful experiences can shatter previously held fundamental benign assumptions about oneself, the world, one’s place in it and one’s hope for the future [3]. Furthermore, the multiple interrelated social, economic, biological and medical factors that are referred to as syndemic interacted and amplified each other, resulting in increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, substance abuse and suicidality [4, 5]. The United States Surgeon General issued several advisories analyzing the relevant public health threats exacerbated by the pandemic and articulated urgent calls to action [6–8]. He takes a broad biopsychosocial point of view and maps out strategic interventions that young people, families, schools, health care organizations, technology companies, media and government can implement. He further emphasizes that there was an existing youth mental health crisis prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. For college mental health professionals,
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