Reckonings

Scientists and drug manufacturers should never again be able to tell us how we should live—or worse yet, with the support of government, force us to live in a particular way

A new study shows that the stress of the pandemic social-restrictions caused the brains of adolescents, and particularly young girls, to age at an accelerated rate, putting them at higher risk of various neuropsychiatric and behavioural disorders.

Scientists carried out a long-term study on girls and boys aged 9-17, covering the period from 2018-2021. On average, the brains of girls aged an additional 4.2 years over this period, while the brains of boys aged an extra 1.4 years.

Using advanced imaging techniques, like MRI, the scientists measured key indices of brain health including gray-matter volume, cortical thickness and white-matter integrity, which are used to estimate an individual’s brain age.

Cortical thinning, for example, takes place normally over the course of adolescence, as parts of the outer layer are “pruned” to help the brain function more efficiently. It’s well established, however, that if an individual is subject to chronic stress in any form—whether that’s social stress, sleep deprivation or an illness—thinning can take place at an accelerated rate. When an individual’s brain age exceeds their actual age, there’s a greater risk of everything from cognitive decline to anxiety and mood disorders, especially among children and teenagers.

And that’s exactly what the researchers behind the new study found: a significant increase in cortical thinning over a very short period of time, indicating severe stress.

For boys, the thinning was localised, and mainly affected visual-spatial regions of the brain, but for girls, the thinning was widespread, affecting many regions across both hemispheres and lobes. These included areas responsible for social and emotional processing, such as the fusiform gyrus and the superior temporal cortex. The researchers think this difference has something to do with the fact that girls rely more heavily on their social networks for support, and these networks were totally disrupted by the pandemic.

The pandemic was hell for young people. There’s no other way to describe it. Anybody who was actually paying attention and not cowering in their home, spraying their mail and DoorDash orders with disinfectant, should know that, without the need for scientific studies. And yet, studies like this new one are useful, because they help us to quantify, and further understand, exactly how and why it was hell, and what the likely effects are going to be in years to come.

Last summer, I wrote a long piece on how governments and the willing public inverted the normal meaning of generational sacrifice during the pandemic, offering up the young, and especially the very young, to sustain older generations and the elderly, who were really the only ones at any risk from COVID-19.

I compared the pandemic response to the ancient Chinese practice of gegu, or filial cannibalism. In the utterly ass-backward Confucian worldview that governed China for thousands of years, where xiao or filial piety was the highest value, it was considered good form for young people to feed themselves, quite literally, to their parents and grandparents, as the ultimate display of respect and honour for the older generations.

Young men and women would cut off fingers or portions of the upper arm or thigh and feed them, often cooked in special soups and hotpots, to their elders. The practice might also be accompanied by coprophagia, as the young ate their parents’ or grandparents’ feces, in another revolting display of submission of the young to the old.

Gegu continued over hundreds if not thousands of years—cases were still documented in the mid-twentieth century—and frankly I can’t think of a better analogy for what went on during those crazy four years that many people, not to mention governments, the medical establishment and corporations, now seem content to pretend never happened.

The truth is, we abandoned the young. Worse than that, we tortured them, isolating them and depriving them of love, comfort and the friendship of their peers and their own families. All in the name of saving their elders from the disease, something it’s not even clear we actually achieved.

I think this bespeaks a broader, deepening hostility in our culture to the interests of the young, most of all the basic desire of the young to reproduce.

As I wrote in that long essay,

“The promise of rising prosperity that was once handed down from generation to generation is gone, and instead the young now look at the old and see things they are never likely to have: houses, spouses, and kids of their own. ‘Fur babies,’ vasectomies, and ‘van life’ are the new symbols of the barren and the dispossessed.”

But that’s another matter. 

There needs to be a reckoning—not just of all the different harms that were caused to those it should have been our sacred duty and mission to protect, but also against those who are most responsible for that terrible dereliction. Two reckonings, then.