Mask Mandates Damaged College Students Emotionally

Writing for The College Fix site UNLV student Katelynn Richardson assesses the damage done to students by mask mandates and social distancing.

Apparently, the damage our public health officials did to children did not limit itself to elementary schools. These officials, with their mania about controlling behavior and especially with canceling socialization, damaged the mental health of college students.

Naturally, they will now start protesting about how we need more mental health services. Unfortunately, they are responsible for producing the crisis and ought to begin by taking responsibility for it. The self-righteous and self-aggrandizing bureaucrats who took complete charge of the pandemic response ought to be held accountable, not only for the body count but also for the damage they wrought on children’s cognitive and emotional development.

So, college administrators chose to desocialize students. The result, not only loneliness but students who lost the ability to relate to each other face to face. When you cannot see someone’s face, you are likely to lose your capacity to relate to people directly. One understands that Zoom meetings are not an adequate compensation.

Richardson writes:

Students no longer know how to relate to one another face to face

College students are isolated.

A Harvard study from last year found 61 percent of young adults ages 18 to 25 feel “serious loneliness,” with 43 percent of these respondents reporting increases since the pandemic. The Healthy Minds Study, which surveyed students at 36 schools during fall 2020, also found 66 percent felt isolated from others.

It’s not limited to younger students. One non-traditional 43-year-old student said she simply attended class and left, not forming any relationships. She explains, “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.”

Richardson remarks that mask mandates seem to correlate with the currently popular cancel culture. When young people cannot connect by face-to-face contact, they become reduced to mental processing. And when you cannot distinguish between friend and foe by reading facial expressions, you are reduced to worrying about ideological conformity. It might not seem very clear, but surely Richardson is on to something:

So, worried what our peers may think, we hide our faces and our thoughts. Habitual mask-wearing is just a physical reminder of an issue that has been quietly chipping away at the morale of students for years — a lack of deep relationships.

It’s no wonder. Real relationships require some level of openness. Openness becomes socially risky when campus culture is gripped by a progressive ideology that won’t tolerate dissent. As University of Virginia senior Emma Camp shared in a recent New York Times op-ed, self-censorship on college campuses is real.

The smallest misstep can ostracize you from your peers.

Ironically, the very isolation that COVID restrictions exacerbated makes us increasingly susceptible to the kind of social control that was necessary to maintain them. It makes us less likely to risk disagreeing.

So, it is easier to control desocialized students. They lack any sense of belonging to a coherent social group, so they glom on to the approved causes-- because it makes them feel like they belong to a cult or a faction.

We’ll pretend to be brave and vocal, but only about approved causes. It’s why we latch onto every passing social movement and social media trend—from posting a black square on Instagram, to putting pronouns in bios, and yes, to wearing masks. Students are filling their need for fellowship with “solidarity” and political advocacy.

There is something disingenuous about claiming to care about one another while cutting off friends and family who think differently, lest we forget how many people banned each other from family gatherings and were willing to segregate peers from polite society because of a personal decision to decline a medical procedure.

Precisely.