Managing psychological distress in children and adolescents following the COVID-19 epidemic: A cooperative approach.

Abstract

Children and adolescents are susceptible to the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic and tend to show posttraumatic distress. Immediately after an epidemic, governments and social organizations often provide psychological services for children and adolescents to relieve their distress. However, many adolescents report distress even long after a traumatic event because of the unaddressed traumatic atmosphere in schools or families. To advance this issue, this article proposes a cooperative model of psychological services provision for children and adolescents in response to the COVID-19 epidemic. This model suggests that psychological services should simultaneously include social, school, and family systems, which interact and have a synergistic effect. The social system provides direct services not only for children and adolescents but also for their school and family systems; school and family systems cooperate to support adolescents. Psychological work also needs to emphasize the key elements of school and family systems. Attention should be given to teachers’ distress, teacher–student relationships, and peer relationships in the school system, as well as to parents’ distress, parent–child relationships, and the marital relationship in the family system. In these ways, adolescents can achieve an efficient and sustainable recovery following a disaster. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)