ABSTRACT

Objective

Internalizing problems are common in adolescence and increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although rates of anxiety and depression have since improved, the general increase in the prevalence of mental health problems and disruptions to mental health services during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in huge gaps in care. Although research has primarily focused on proximal correlates of internalizing problems, a growing literature suggests that factors outside youths’ immediate microsystems are equally crucial for their mental well-being. Thus, it is important to investigate multisystemic correlates of internalizing problems to inform individual and community-based interventions to address the current mental health burden.

Method

Leveraging secondary data from a nationally diverse U.S. sample of 2,954 adolescents (ages 13–16), we examined the associations between factors at multiple levels of youths’ ecologies – spanning indicators of threat and deprivation – and their depression and anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, in follow-up exploratory analyses, we examined if these associations differed by adolescents’ racial/ethnic groups.

Results

Consistent with socioecological models, we found that indicators of threat and deprivation in the adolescents’ immediate home and more distal neighborhood environments were associated with depression and anxiety symptoms. The patterns of associations were similar across racial/ethnic groups in multigroup structural equation models. Additionally, we found that mean levels of internalizing symptoms and socioecological predictors significantly differed across racial/ethnic groups.

Conclusion

These findings have important implications for understanding multi-level contributors to adolescent mental health, which may inform research, practice, and policy.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 大流行期间美国青少年样本中的生态系统导致症状内化

摘要

客观的

内化问题在青春期很常见，并且在 COVID-19 大流行期间大幅增加。尽管焦虑和抑郁的发病率此后有所改善，但在 COVID-19 大流行期间，心理健康问题的普遍增加和心理健康服务的中断导致了护理方面的巨大差距。尽管研究主要集中在内化问题的近端相关性上，但越来越多的文献表明，青少年直接微系统之外的因素对于他们的心理健康同样重要。因此，调查内化问题的多系统相关性，为个人和社区的干预措施提供信息，以解决当前的心理健康负担非常重要。

方法

利用美国全国范围内 2,954 名青少年（13-16 岁）样本的二手数据，我们研究了青少年生态学多个层面的因素（涵盖威胁和剥夺指标）与他们在新冠肺炎疫情期间的抑郁和焦虑症状之间的关联。 19 流行病。此外，在后续的探索性分析中，我们检查了这些关联是否因青少年的种族/族裔群体而异。

结果

与社会生态学模型一致，我们发现青少年的直接家庭和更远的邻里环境中的威胁和剥夺指标与抑郁和焦虑症状相关。在多组结构方程模型中，不同种族/民族的关联模式相似。此外，我们发现不同种族/族裔群体的内化症状和社会生态学预测因子的平均水平存在显着差异。

结论

这些发现对于理解青少年心理健康的多层次影响因素具有重要意义，这可能为研究、实践和政策提供信息。