The COVID-19 pandemic is an event that disrupted routines and mental health of youth. To control the spread of the virus, strategies such as extensive closures and school moving to online platforms took place across Canada. News articles were released daily about COVID-19 and its effects on youth mental health, the impacts of disrupted routines, and available supports. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how youth mental health was portrayed in news articles during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I explored how journalists portrayed and disseminated information about youth mental health and corresponding supports and psychosocial services during this time was completed. News articles from two major Ontario news outlets published from March 11th, 2020, to January 31st, 2021, were retrieved from the ProQuest Canadian Major Dailies database by searching the terms “coronavirus” and/or “COVID-19”. The articles were then filtered to retrieve those related to child and youth mental health. In total, n=391 articles were included in the final analysis. The text and language in the media articles were analyzed following a six-step process of thematic analysis. My analysis revealed five themes: 1) Youth mental health challenges throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) inequity and disproportionate impacts among youth; 3) effects of public health isolation and distancing measures; 4) impacts of the pandemic on schooling; and 5) managing the impacts of the pandemic. To summarize and integrate the themes, I created a conceptual model that shows the potential for intended and unintended impacts of the pandemic restriction measures on youth mental health. This analysis provides a view of youth mental health in Ontario news media during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the importance of psychosocial services in future disaster risk management.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/43408 |
| Date | 24 March 2022 |
| Creators | Dancey, Maya |
| Contributors | O'sullivan, Tracey, Grudniewicz, Agnieszka |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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