Mental illness of university students in Brazil

before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The worsening of mental health-related problems during the Covid-19 pandemic has already been understood by some authors as a parallel pandemic. The damage to the mental health of university students is a serious problem that has been present for many years, but which, however, had not been recognized by a large part of the academic community until recently. In this article, I propose to carry out a comparative debate between important factors for the mental health of university students in the period before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to identify continuities and novelties that this meeting of pandemics brought. As an initial argument, I take an ethnography on the mental health of university students, carried out in the period before the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, in order to understand what has been happening since the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, I make use of scientific articles and, occasionally, newspaper articles published during the pandemic. In the end, I discuss what were the continuities and ruptures in the pre-pandemic scenario and during the current one.

KEYWORDS:
University. Mental Health. Pandemic. Syndemic.

Photo: Camila de Oliveira