Educators, Pediatricians, Researchers, and Local Politicians Panic About Treatment for the Post-pandemic Crisis of Depressed and Anxious Kids

Is it possible that a virus we all carry is damaging our children’s and our own psychological health—especially that of Long Covid and ME/CFS patients?

It’s hard to deny the worldwide economic damage done by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, researchers, pediatricians, and politicians are focused on how the pandemic unraveled many of the threads that hold societies together—and the effect that unraveling is having on young people who fear the long future ahead of them.

POLITICO’s Daniel Payne tackled the apparent epidemic of depression and anxiety that educators, particularly, are seeing among young people. In an article published April 10, he notes that local governments are scrambling to solve the “epidemic of kids’ mental illness” that broke out during the pandemic. He also points out, “But there’s a problem: No one knows what’s causing the spike.” (1)

Theories are plentiful. Depending on the researcher, doctor, therapist,
lawmaker or business leader who’s talking, the epidemic level of
children and teens’ mental illness is caused by loneliness, social media,
the opioid-fueled destruction of families, social isolation from smartphones,
climate change’s existential threat, political rancor, overactive parenting,
phone-induced sleep deprivation, long Covid, the decline of churches
and other social institutions, bad diets or environmental toxins. (1)

Payne spoke with Dr. Sunny Patel, the senior adviser for Children, Youth and Families at the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “We’ve moved beyond the navel-gazing around identifying what the issues are,” Patel told Payne. “This is an acute-on-chronic crisis.”

So, what should be done and who is in charge of doing it? Dr. Darby Saxbe (Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California) provides a voice of reason, cautioning against moving too far too fast.

“We shouldn’t let our practice get ahead of the evidence,” Saxbe told Payne—adding her concern that the “scattershot of new ideas” could be “more like a Band-Aid and less like something that’s really going to be meaningful.”

Some research suggests, for instance, that some of the mental health
curriculum in school hasn’t helped—and in some cases, hurt—student
outcomes. And government auditors who assessed one state’s curriculum
change, granted anonymity to discuss the inner workings of their review,
said schools were implementing the policy differently—adding that it’s
unclear whether mental health is improving.

It’s not just for school curriculum: Government leaders behind many of
the programs acknowledge they don’t have enough data to identify the
causes of the crisis. (1)

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who’s working with a new mental health and substance use task force (at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC), also cautioned about being too aggressive in adopting new initiatives that haven’t undergone rigorous—or any—testing.

“There is a tendency to try to do everything,” Kasich told POLITICO. “If you do everything, it’s kind of like you’re not going to do anything.” (1)

However, many state and local governments “feel they can’t wait amid the onslaught of despair in the next generation,” according to Payne, and most agree that fully funded, well-designed, peer-reviewed studies will take too long.

Payne found remorse among some of the politicians involved in trying to solve this mental health crisis.

There may be a hint of guilt among some lawmakers for their roles—if
not personally, then as part of an institution—in creating an America
that many see as more cruel, less hopeful and ripe for despair.

Some clinicians have suggested depressed or anxious thoughts are natural,
perhaps reasonable, responses to the existential threats future generations
face. Others point to the need to reframe the conversation with an emphasis
on the progress humanity has made up to this point. (1)

But as health systems are “overrun” with students suffering from anxiety and depression, some physicians feel they’re not being paid enough to give mental health care to kids.

“The reimbursement is a huge impediment because most of it is paid for by Medicaid,” Michael Dowling, President and CEO of Northwell Health (New York), told Payne. “The more you do, the more money you lose. … From a business point of view, it’s a loser, but it’s something that we have to do.”

So, while some doctors complain that they’re not getting paid enough to help their community’s distressed children and teens, lawmakers fall back on one of their favorite scapegoats: social media.

“Though experts don’t agree on a single driver of the crisis or how to combat it, social media is consistently brought up by policymakers and researchers alike,” Payne reported. “...The exact mechanisms by which social media seems to harm kids is more of a mystery. Clinicians notice children comparing themselves to their peers more when using the platforms, feeling they aren’t measuring up.” (1)

Youth mental health advocate Jorge Alvarez argued that social media can be “dystopian.”

Alvarez told POLITICO that he hears from kids that “The combination of climate change and the anxiety of just existing … [I’m] like, holy shit, things are not okay around me.”

Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, said there should be a “more radical, all-encompassing solution for the crisis,” according to POLITICO—“...some sort of cultural transformation—societal transformation.”

But he admitted to Payne, “They certainly didn’t teach me in medical school how to create social or cultural transformation.” (1)

Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.), leader of the House’s youth mental health task force, told POLITICO, “I have colleagues who are very concerned about their children.”

Her suggestion for solving this crisis: Give kids hope.

“Hope is very powerful because it implies that your personal decisions can make a difference—and that your future can look bright even if this moment of despair feels very real,” Kuster told Payne.

While it’s kind of nice to hear some positive thoughts from our government, is telling anxious, depressed teens to have hope going to solve what people across the spectrum of education, medicine and government consider to be a genuine crisis?

And has anyone looked into the possibility that there may be a physical, even transmissible, cause of the despair kids and teens are experiencing at such high levels?

A research paper published April 4 in Acta Neuropsychiatr by a group of researchers and clinicians from East Asia found that Human Herpes Virus-6 (HHV-6) is not only reactivated in people exposed to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus associated with Covid-19), but also it’s found to cause “affective disorder”—depression/anxiety juxtaposed with hypomania—in post-Covid patients AND in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) patients as well. (2)

This international group is led by Dr. Michael Maes of the Chulalongkorn University and King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in Bangkok (Thailand), with ties to many institutions in that area of the world. Along with four colleagues, Maes studied the correlation of HHV-6, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and immune-oxidative biomarkers in Long Covid, depression, anxiety and ME/CFS (this study assumes that ME/CFS symptoms are secondary to Long Covid). Ninety Long Covid patients were compared to 90 healthy controls. (2)

The major immune biomarker studied by Maes and colleagues was activin-A, which governs B-cell activation in the pancreas.

They were able to distinguish between depression/anxiety (“affective symptoms”) and ME/CFS-like symptoms in Long Covid, and to pinpoint the five top factors of the eight they originally investigated:

The top 5 predictors of affective symptoms due to long COVID were IgM-
HHV-6-duTPase, IgG-HHV-6, CRP, education, IgA-activin-A (predictive
accuracy of r = 0.636). The top 5 predictors of CFS due to long COVID were
in descending order: CRP, IgG-HHV-6-duTPase, IgM-activin-A, IgM-SARS- CoV-2, and IgA-activin-A (predictive accuracy: r = 0.709). (2) [emphasis added]

They stated their findings about causes of Long Covid’s physiological and psychological symptoms more plainly in the paper’s conclusion:

“Reactivation of HHV-6, SARS-CoV-2 persistence, and autoimmune reactions ... play a major role in the pathophysiology of long COVID as well as the severity of its affective symptoms and CFS.” (2)

Maes et. al are not the first researchers to tie reactivation of HHV-6 to psychological disorders.

In 2018, Dr. Bhupesh K. Prusty  (Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany) and colleagues compared brain matter from patients with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and major depressive disorder, and control subjects. They differentiated between the two types of HHV-6: HHV-6A, which is found in adults and is linked statistically to numerous illnesses, and HHV-6B, which infects most infants by age three and can cause Roseola, a common childhood syndrome with rash and fever. (3)

Prusty and colleagues found “significantly high levels of HHV-6A protein and DNA” in the brain tissue from people with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, compared to the controls. Both strains (A and B) were found in all three groups of psychiatric patients.

A 2021 investigation examined whether HHV-6 might be present in another form of mental illness: catatonia. While uncommon, catatonia—a type of encephalopathy—causes a seemingly semi-conscious state in which patients can be agitated, demonstrate ecolalia (repeating a phrase over and over) or mutism (not responding to verbal cues), along with other distressing symptoms. Based in part on Prusty’s study of HHV-6 and mental disorders, this investigation suggested HHV-6 could be involved in encephalopathy and catatonia, as well as other mental disorders (4).

This area of research is not new, even though it is ignored by many researchers. In 1992, Dr. Debra Buchwald and colleagues found active HHV-6 infection to be associated with brain damage in CFS patients. (5) And in a 1996 interview with Dr. Konstance Knox (at the Immunotherapy Program at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee), she described research showing how efficiently HHV-6A destroys tissues, including—but not limited to—brain tissue. (6)

At the time, Knox’s research attempted to describe a possible role for HHV-6A in AIDS, given its intimate interactions with HIV. A small study examining the lymph nodes of HIV-positive and AIDS patients in all stages—“from frank AIDS, to autopsies, all the way up to [HIV-positive] people with CD4 counts over 700,” Knox said—found HHV-6A actively replicating alongside HIV. Knox suggested that a protein of HIV stimulates the growth of HHV-6A, while HHV-6A in turn stimulates HIV replication. (6)

“I think that there is a mutual enhancement [between HIV and HHV-6A] and potentially almost a mutual dependency for efficient replication” of each virus, she asserted. “Where you find HIV, you find HHV-6A.”

Knox also pointed out that her studies have shown HHV-6A to be far more destructive than HIV. “Where we have seen HHV-6A in tissues, we see dead tissues,” she said. “And where you see HIV—you know, you can have HIV alone, and you may see some reactive changes, like the immune system reacting to a viral infection as if you have flu or something like that.

“But you don’t see dead tissue,” she continued. “You don’t see destroyed organs and scar formation, and that’s what you see when you see HHV-6A [in tissues].”

Is it possible that a relatively newly described virus is attacking brain tissues as described by Knox or, at the very least, contributing to the mental health crisis described by POLITICO? 

Researchers are starting to take the post-pandemic outbreak of depression, anxiety, and other mental disturbances seriously. In 2023, a research team from Slovakia reported that anxiety and depression increased 25% worldwide following the pandemic. (7)

Not only children and teens, but also people with Long Covid, ME/CFS, and the entire worldwide population should demand that more, and more credible, research be done in this arena.  

AUTHOR’S NOTE: You can read my two most recent books as Kindle ebooks or paperbacks on Amazon: America’s Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About The Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome Epidemic And Its Link To AIDS, Updated 2^nd Edition (2022), and Ampligen: The Battle for a Promising ME/CFS Drug (2022).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.        Daniel Payne. “Anxiety and depression is spiking among young people. No one knows why. Desperate to help record numbers of children suffering anxiety and depression, state and local governments are testing new interventions to get to the root of the crisis—even if they don’t know what that is.” POLITICO, 4-10-24.
2.        Aristo Vojdani, Abbas F Almulla, Bo Zhou, Hussein K Al-Hakeim, Michael Maes. “Reactivation of herpesvirus type 6 and IgA/IgM-mediated responses to activin-A underpin long COVID, including affective symptoms and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” Acta Neuropsychiatr. 2024 Apr 4:1-13.  doi: 10.1017/neu.2024.10.  Online ahead of print.
3.        Prusty, B.K.; Gulver, N.; Govind, S.; Krueger, G.R.F.; Feichtinger, J.; Larcombe, L.; Aspinall, R., Ablashi, D.V. and Toro, C.T. “Active HHV-6 Infection of Cerebellar Purkinje Cells in Mood Disorders”; Front. Microbiol. 2018; 9: 1955. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.01955
4.        Das, S. “An Investigation into the Significance of HHV-6 in Catatonia and Mental Health Disorders”; Sushruta J Health Pol & Opin. 2021; Vol 14; Issue 2: Art 6ePub 12.6.21. https://doi.org/10.38192/14.2
5.        Buchwald D. et al. “A Chronic Illness Characterized by Fatigue, Neurologic and Immunologic Disorders, and Active Human Herpesvirus Type 6 Infection”; Ann. Intern. Med. 1992; 116: 103-113.
6.        Knox, K.K. and Carrigan, D.R. "Active HHV-6 Infection in the Lymph Nodes of HIV Infected Patients: In vitro Evidence That HHV-6 Can Break HIV Latency"; Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes and Human Retrovirology, April 1, 1996.
7.        Ida Kupcova, Lubos Danisovic, Martin Klein, and Stefan Harsanyi. “Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mental Health, Anxiety, and Depression.” BMC Psychol. 2023; 11: 108. doi: 10.1186/s40359-023-01130-5