Adolescents’ mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic: The role of SEL skills and resilience

Research points out that half of the mental health issues (e.g., anxiety, depression, self-harm) starts at approximately 14 years of age. During and as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, adolescents reported an exacerbation of negative feelings, such as stress, worries, anxiety, helplessness, depression, and lack of motivation. Recent literature has shown that SEL and resilience are protective factors for mental health from the preschool years onward. However, few studies have focused on these variables during adolescence or on their combined contribution to explaining mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. 778 Italian adolescents aged between 11 and 16 years (mean age = 12.73 years; SD = 1.73) were recruited from 18 schools in Northern Italy. They completed three self-report online questionnaires: the SSIS-SELb-S as a measure of SEL skills, the CD-RISC 10 to evaluate resilience, and the SDQ to measure mental health in terms of internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and prosocial behavior. Results showed that SEL skills and resilience were positively and significantly associated with each other, negatively correlated with internalizing and externalizing problems, and positively related to prosocial behavior. Linear regression analyses showed that resilience, age, and gender played a significant role in explaining the variance of internalizing problems; SEL skills, resilience, age, and gender significantly explained the variance of externalizing problems; and SEL skills, age, and gender has a significant role in explaining prosocial behavior. Furthermore, resilience fully mediated the relationship between SEL skills and internalizing problems, partially mediated the relationship between SEL skills and externalizing problems, and didn’t mediate the relationship between SEL skills and prosocial behavior. The findings have important practical implications and highlight the need of improving resilience and SEL skills in adolescence to protect from mental health issues.