Will it ever end? COVID-19 strains mental health and personal relationships

February 4, 2022 — by Selina Chen, Lihi Shoshani and Shaan Sridhar
After two years of living in a pandemic world, the Saratoga community has faced a great toll in their lives.

Two years after the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the widespread restrictions that followed, a study led by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has shown that the majority of Americans have suffered from increased mental health issues as the pandemic persists.

Here, the constant interruption of COVID-19 has kept some students and staff in constant fear of becoming infected. Even with the return of most sports and extracurricular activities, there have been major disruptions that keep students on edge, such as the recent COVID-19 outbreak on the boys’ basketball team and the cancelations of the Media Arts Program and Leadership program overnight field trips.

Students and staff members interviewed by The Falcon say that, despite being largely physically healthy, the inability to see family, anxiety from fear of infection and isolation from social relationships have continued to take a heavy toll.

 

“I haven’t seen like a lot of my relatives for a long time”

The last time senior Miwa Okumura saw her father in person was during the winter of her freshman year. Because he lives in Japan, Okumura was able to visit him roughly once a year or so. That ended in 2020.

Okumura’s father, who is in his 60s, did not have WiFi prior to the pandemic, but traveling difficulties motivated him to install it.

“Now, I can speak to him online whenever I want, so that’s the only positive thing that came out of [the pandemic],” she said.

Despite their virtual connection, Okumura is planning to visit Japan this summer no matter the state of the pandemic. 

“There’s this frustration that you need to go back. You feel that, but you can’t go back — for your own safety and for everyone else’s,” Okumura said.

For younger students like Linh Do, a seventh grader at Redwood Middle School, the pandemic has resulted in two possibilities when connecting with relatives: Communicate over social media or grow apart.

While Do used to frequently visit his relatives in Vietnam, Australia and Europe, as well as in California, he hasn’t seen many of them for a long time — ranging from three months to two years.

Do was in fifth grade when the pandemic started and experienced a disconnect with his friends after transitioning to remote learning. Increasingly, however, he’s been expanding his online presence on Discord and Google Hangouts to keep in touch with friends.

While Do said he preferred online school because he could “watch YouTube,” he said that he learns more in person.

However, he added that he is still concerned about the COVID-19 infection risk of in-person school.

“In PE, a lot of people have their masks off when they’re running a mile, but I keep my mask on,” Do said. “My parents tell me to, but even when they don’t, I still keep it on. I’m not constantly worried, but I’m worried sometimes.”

“A never-ending cycle of pain, anxiety and stress”

Do’s anxiety about contracting COVID-19 is common among students, observed junior Tanya Ghai, an officer of Sources of Strength, the mental health club focused on promoting the Wellness Center and its resources.

Indeed, the most common reason students have for visiting the Wellness Center is anxiety, constituting 39% of its visits, according to the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District Wellness Center Biannual Report.

A few weeks ago, Sources of Strength hosted a discussion regarding the stress that resulted from the omicron variant surge.

“We’re trying to convey to all of our members and the school in general that we’re all here for each other,” Ghai said.

Ghai noted that a big factor of anxiety is students’ concern of getting relatives such as grandparents infected, making them fearful to socialize in person.

“Frustrated and anxious — that’s what I gauged from people’s feelings,” she said.

Ghai added she finds comfort in Wellness Center director Marina Barnes’s words: “History has shown that we as humans are strong, resilient people. This is going to end; it’ll just take some time.”

On the other hand, senior Noora Fayad, who attends the district’s online independent study alternative, described her experience in what feels like a never-ending pandemic as numb and exhausting.

“We’re normalizing COVID-19 just like we normalized other horrible things that are happening, such as police brutality, hunger and poverty,” Fayad said. “It’s the normalization that really affected me.”

She called her experience with COVID-19 “traumatic” as she hears her father, who is a healthcare professional, call patients with the virus regularly; listening to the coughing and crying over video chat is difficult because she said she knows “[the patients] are scared they’re going to die.”

People experience difficulty getting out of bed due to crippling headaches, she said. She feels that the general student population is stuck in a “never-ending cycle of pain, anxiety and stress.”

“The pressure we put on ourselves is just so overwhelming,” she said. “Sometimes, I hear students cry two to three times a day. It’s so bad, but people who just look at us don’t understand.”

 

“Nobody understands what it’s like”

Math teacher Kristen Hamilton felt a rush of anxiety when she heard that an early January all-staff meeting was going to be held on Zoom. Other pandemic-induced protocols, such as the district asking all teachers to bring their laptops home each day after school in case online schooling is needed again, has forced Hamilton to redefine her work-life boundaries, she said.

She particularly disagrees with the administration’s recent rule that bans groups of teachers from eating lunch indoors together. Even though she understands the policy is a necessary precaution due to the omicron surge, she hopes that there can be a softening of policies as cases decrease.

“Every day I go to work, and I’m in my little cave here,” Hamilton said. “I have all my students, but there has to be a barrier because your students can’t be your friends.”

For this reason, she said she highly values spending lunchtime with fellow teachers and misses it.

“I haven’t been able to communicate with anyone except for my little bubble,” she said. “We share so many things because nobody understands what it’s like to be a teacher except other teachers at your school.”

Hamilton said the district’s policies are effectively a double standard: Students can still go off campus or eat in groups, while teachers have been told to hold meetings online and avoid eating in groups inside while the surge is happening.

She thinks better communication between teachers and administrators would help everyone get through this difficult time with more understanding, Hamilton said.

 

“I’m much more reclusive”

During winter break, freshman Madison Kerner moved to Saratoga from New York City, where she’d lived her whole life, due to her father transitioning to in-person work at Google.

As she assimilated to her new school, she said she found that masks pose a major obstacle to meeting new friends.

“I don’t really know anybody’s face under their mask,” she said. “It can be more difficult to express emotion and interact with people because facial expressions reveal a lot about how they react to things emotionally. The way people smile or frown can tell you so much.”

Because Kerner isn’t active on social media, she is trying to make friends through her classes, which is proving to be challenging.

“I’m much more reclusive,” she said. “I don’t talk to people as much as I used to in person.”

For Fayad’s part, she had been frequently coming to school for clubs and hanging out with friends outside during the fall semester, but with the omicron surge, she now feels stressed about leaving her house. With everyone on campus being a close contact, she calls school a “COVID-19 petri dish.”

Problems also exist with the independent study alternative, however. She has heard of students falling behind on Edgenuity, the platform that offers courses for those in online learning, because of how draining life has been. She finds the weekly check-ins with school personnel to be not very useful, even “awkward,” because they only touch on academic progress, and are conducted with a group of unfamiliar students.

Reflecting on her experiences, Fayad said she believes that there should be more outreach to students to support their mental health, and deliver input on what is happening to them and their family.

“There needs to be proactive mental health care,” she said. “I think students have actually reached their breaking point, but we’re also so numb and emotionless that we don’t even realize that we’ve reached it,” she said.

To seek help with mental health, call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at (800)273-8255 or visit CASSY at the Wellness Center.

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