Questions and Emotions of Minors After Terrorist Attacks: A Qualitative Study Using Data from a Belgian Youth-Helpline

Overmeire, Roel Van; Six, Stefaan; Vesentini, Lara; Deschepper, Reginald; Denys, Elke; Vandekerckhove, Marie; Bilsen, Johan

doi:10.1007/s10597-019-00482-w

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Since it was first reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) on December 31, 2019, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has cumulatively infected more than 130 million people, and it caused nearly 3 million deaths worldwide as of April 14, 2021 ( 1 ). Extensive research has shown that major adverse social events, such as terrorist attacks ( 2 , 3 ), economic crises ( 4 , 5 ), natural disasters ( 6 , 7 ), and pandemics ( 8 – 10 ), can have a severe impact on people's mental health. As the most severe pandemic in recent decades, COVID-19 rapidly spread across the world, and the social impacts have far exceeded those of other pandemics, including the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and novel influenza A (H1N1) pandemics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Factors Are Most Closely Associated With Mood Disorders in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study Based on 1,771 Adolescents in Shandong Province, China

et al. 2021

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Background and Aims: COVID-19 has been proven to harm adolescents' mental health, and several psychological influence factors have been proposed. However, the importance of these factors in the development of mood disorders in adolescents during the pandemic still eludes researchers, and practical strategies for mental health education are limited.Methods: We constructed a sample of 1,771 adolescents from three junior high middle schools, three senior high middle schools, and three independent universities in Shandong province, China. The sample stratification was set as 5:4:3 for adolescent aged from 12 – 15, 15 – 18, 18 – 19. We examined the subjects' anxiety, depression, psychological resilience, perceived social support, coping strategies, subjective social/school status, screen time, and sleep quality with suitable psychological scales. We chose four widely used classification models-k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT), and a combination of the GBDT and LR (GBDT + LR)-to construct machine learning models, and we utilized the Shapley additive explanations value (SHAP) to measure how the features affected the dependent variables. The area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves was used to evaluate the performance of the models.Results: The current rates of occurrence of symptoms of anxiety and depression were 28.3 and 30.8% among the participants. The descriptive and univariate analyses showed that all of the factors included were statistically related to mood disorders. Among the four machine learning algorithms, the GBDT+LR algorithm achieved the best performance for anxiety and depression with average AUC values of 0.819 and 0.857. We found that the poor sleep quality was the most significant risk factor for mood disorders among Chinese adolescents. In addition, according to the feature importance (SHAP) of the psychological factors, we proposed a five-step mental health education strategy to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic (sleep quality-resilience-coping strategy-social support-perceived social status).Conclusion: In this study, we performed a cross-sectional investigation to examine the psychological impact of COVID-19 on adolescents. We applied machine learning algorithms to quantify the importance of each factor. In addition, we proposed a five-step mental health education strategy for school psychologists.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Factors Are Most Closely Associated With Mood Disorders in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study Based on 1,771 Adolescents in Shandong Province, China

et al. 2021

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“…Finally, van Overmeire et al (2020) found that discussions in class about terrorism did not help pupils who already had a distorted world image; in these cases, classroom discussions did not bring them much solace in coping with their emotions. Yet, for the large majority of the teachers and pupils alike, our research does point in a hopeful direction: most of them remained levelheaded during the lockdown and amidst a high-profile attack.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The teachers who were interviewed tried to respond constructively by first helping the pupils to cope with their emotions. In this situation, creating a safe and calm classroom environment while carefully monitoring the reactions of the pupils was a first important step and shows that the teachers intuitively tried to meet the emotional needs of pupils as described by van Overmeire et al (2020).…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Theoretical framework van Overmeire et al (2020) investigated the experiences of minors who were indirectly exposed to terrorist attacks based on data gained through a youth helpline. They found that children expressed a twofold need when confronted with attacks: they were in need of a space to express and handle their emotional reactions, and they articulated a demand for information and an explanation about the shocking events that took place.…”

Section: Discussing Terrorism As a "Settled" Or As An "Open" Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teaching under attack: The dilemmas, goals, and practices of upper-elementary school teachers when dealing with terrorism in class

Wansink

Graaf

Berghuis

2021

Theory & Research in Social Education

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This article investigates how 12 upper-elementary school teachers dealt with the occurrence of a terrorist attack in their city during school hours and in the immediate aftermath. All teachers were interviewed shortly after the terrorist attack about their goals, dilemmas, and pedagogical strategies employed in the classroom. We found that during the day of the attack the teachers tried to focus on providing both emotional support and adequate information to the pupils. While doing so, the teachers encountered four types of dilemmas: their perceived lack of knowledge concerning the attack and terrorism in general, their worry about increasing fear among pupils by discussing terrorism, the conundrum of balancing the different (and contrasting) perspectives of the pupils, and the lack of clear management support or guidelines issued. The findings are discussed through the lens of a pedagogy for political trauma, and a case is made for expanding this pedagogy with a historicizing approach. Such an approach may provide teachers with a (depoliticized) framework of reference that enables them to help pupils understand and reflect on the upsetting and contested topic of terrorism.

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Systematic Review: The State of Research Into Youth Helplines

Mathieu

Uddin

Brady

et al. 2021

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psych

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Questions and Emotions of Minors After Terrorist Attacks: A Qualitative Study Using Data from a Belgian Youth-Helpline

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

What Factors Are Most Closely Associated With Mood Disorders in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study Based on 1,771 Adolescents in Shandong Province, China

What Factors Are Most Closely Associated With Mood Disorders in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study Based on 1,771 Adolescents in Shandong Province, China

Teaching under attack: The dilemmas, goals, and practices of upper-elementary school teachers when dealing with terrorism in class

Systematic Review: The State of Research Into Youth Helplines

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