Peer-Reviewed Commentary is out

"School closures, the pandemic, and pediatric mental health: Scrutinizing the evidence"

I’m thrilled that finally, our paper scrutinizing the inconsistent and sometimes misleading use of evidence about children’s mental health during the pandemic, has been published. The publication represents over a year of work with my amazing co-authors, and was a rigorous, peer-reviewed process. I hope that everyone gets a chance to read it.

The Journal is the Journal of my speciality - the Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and fortunately, it is open-access, meaning that you can read all of the articles. We submitted our commentary, which was then joined by different viewpoints, to which we had an opportunity to respond.

Our primary article is here: (PDF - click here to read)

Our response to the rejoinders is here: (PDF - click here to read)

Does it mention suicidology? Of course it does:

Suicides and mental-health related emergency department visits are an emerging source of population-level data on the pandemic’s secondary impacts. In 2020, the number of suicides in Canadians under the age of 20 (n=211) decreased from five years prior to the pandemic (n=238-277), making it the third-lowest year for deaths by suicide in this age group for the past 21 years.
- Black et al, 2023

Please have read, and enjoy the weekend!