The effects of remote instruction on the mental health of students

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools switched to remote instruction. What effects did the switch to remote instruction have on the mental health of students?

This question is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of facts. The effects of the switch to remote instruction are not a matter of personal perspective, but a matter of empirical data.

A forthcoming paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy uses Swedish data to study this question. As shown in Figure 1, only a portion of Swedish students switched to remote instruction, which makes possible to create a control group (the students in remote instruction) and a treatment group (the students in in-person instruction).

Thanks to this natural experiment and as illustrated in Figure 2, Evelina Björkegren, Helena Svaleryd and Jonas Vlachos, the three authors of the article, find that the students in remote instruction used psychiatric care services 4.4% less often than the students in in-person instruction. The decrease is mostly due to a reduction in diagnoses and prescriptions for depressive disorders and anxiety disorders.