Looking back at the 2020s: Pandemic, youth mental health and the arts

Every pandemic requires a social reset.¹ Catastrophic health crises not only reveal the asymmetry of the global order and expose the fissures of systematic inequalities: they also bring an imminent sense of mortality and a heightened perception of the precariousness of life. In times of economic, political and social vulnerability, an uncharted space emerges for artists to call for a recalibration of values. The cultural response to AIDS/HIV in the late twentieth century was such a moment when artists were critical not only in reinforcing public health messages, but also in opening new discursive spaces, resisting silence, and advocating for permanent changes to the way in which sex, sexuality, contagion, disease and wellbeing were imagined and lived. Forty years ago, the coronavirus global pandemic (COVID-19) similarly revealed social fractures that forced a radical rethink about how people would live together in the future. Opening the archive of the Far Apart But Close at Heart research projects in 2063 we can discover how young artists from ten cultural organisations in the UK and Latin America faced the challenge of a global pandemic.

Over the last four decades we have often heard how the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic laid bare a crisis in the systems of care of the 2020s.² The Far Apart research sought to understand how arts organisations that worked in under-resourced, lower income communities functioned as part of the system of care supporting the mental health of young people during the pandemic. Using quantitative surveys, interviews and digital arts workshops, the research asked what could be learned from the creative online experiences of young people in Latin America and in what was then known as the United Kingdom, during a global pandemic. People’s Palace Projects – who produced the original research projects 40 years ago – is a research organisation that in 2063 is still developing arts-based collaborative projects to address social justice and development challenges. The Far Apart archive from the 2020s brings insights into how artists and arts organisations in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cardiff, Lima, London, Manchester, and Rio de Janeiro reimagined their creative work with young people when live participatory arts work was shut down and moved online in response to the pandemic.³ It registers how the shift to digital impacted arts organisations’ capacity to support young people’s mental wellbeing and offers fascinating pointers towards the need for the sort of integrated approach to arts and medicine that is now incorporated into all progressive public health systems, most notably in Latin America.

Looking back from 2063, a time in which the epistemologies of a Global South and North (O’Brien, 2017) have been radically revised, the Far Apart archive transports us to a historical period still dominated by the Eurocentrism of knowledge production, where young people were trying to create an imaginary space from which it might be possible to look beyond these binaries. The way in which the research was conceived sought to shift four Latin American countries from their peripheral position within pandemic preoccupations and resist what a Canadian public health academic, citing Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), described as ‘centuries-long Western dismissal of knowledge, practices, experiences, and existential meaning generated in the Global South’ (Birn, 2020: 355). Far Apart reconstituted young people as researchers rather than as the source of data or anecdotal evidence; the research suggested how hidden, ignored or marginalised narratives can shape more nuanced understandings of pandemics.

Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru are no strangers to contagious diseases that wipe out populations. They have a shared but heterogeneous experience of the lethal and lingering pandemic of colonialism which decimated peoples and left a legacy of structural inequalities, systemic violence and ongoing resource deficits. But as the young Latin Americans engaged in the Far Apart research demonstrated in the 2020s, it is also possible to create alternative narratives that draw strength from the resistance that is characteristic of the continent’s historic and contemporary response to invasion, occupation and annihilation. The methodologies and thematic analysis were co-created and designed by British and Latin American researchers with support from young people to be implemented in these four Latin American countries in 2020. The same research framework was then used again for a second phase of the research in England and Wales in 2021. Far Apart was built across South-South and North-South axes of cooperation and exchange, but with research methods constituted initially in Latin America.

Before the pandemic there were already clear signs that young people were in the midst of a global mental health crisis. The Far Apart archive includes a World Health Organisation report (2018) which identified reducing adolescent depression and anxiety as a key priority. The pandemic exacerbated mental distress in general, but the effect was particularly acute in the young adult age group. Furthermore, the impact was intensified for young people who were made more vulnerable by intersecting challenges such as poor mental health, low educational achievement and social exclusion, including structural racism (Shim and Starks, 2021). Creative research produced by young people and arts organisations during the Far Apart study corroborated evidence that measures taken to control the spread of coronavirus were triggers for young people (Kowal et al., 2020; Varma et al., 2021). The consequences of restrictive public health regulations introduced during the pandemic which especially affected young people included lack of social contact, overload of information from social media platforms, lack of personal space, reduced autonomy and concern about the impact on the economy and their academic studies.

Participatory arts programmes with social as well as creative outcomes were referenced as a potential ingredient in mental health recovery and resilience amongst young people (Easwaran et al., 2021; Syed Sheriff et al., 2022; see Figure 6.1). As public health measures to control the spread of the pandemic locked down normal social intercourse, research began to show an increase in mental distress (including depression and anxiety), with an acute impact on the young adult age group. Arts organisations working with young people made profound changes to their practices and methods to cater for the increased needs of the young people they worked with, from a distance none of them had ever experienced. It was the learning from these drastic and often abrupt shifts in the 2020s that established the ways in which arts organisations have subsequently worked with young people. The pandemic established new relations with the health sector and contributed to reframing the relationship between cultural and medical institutions in the Latin American region, which now leads the world in radical approaches to public health.

Figure 6.1Young person participating in an in-person session as part of the Far Apart UK workshops delivered by National Theatre of Wales (Wrexham, Wales), 2021.

The archive created during the Far Apart project also contains artwork produced by young people across 18 months of research in two continents, registering the different layers of emotions young people expressed during the pandemic. For example, it records the time-space compression experienced at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyday objects such as bags and shoes failed to move for days, for weeks, for months. As the pandemic progressed, a subtle transition to hope can be seen in the artwork, with new opportunities for young people arising as services, arts organisations and the young people themselves began to adapt. The archive also captures the young artists’ fears of the future. Far Apart shows young people in a state of shock: frozen in an uncertain expanse of time, confined in the four walls of their bedrooms for many hours a day. Cut off from friends, from school and from activities that previously helped them build resilience to depression and anxiety, young people were forced to press an indefinite pause button. The artwork in Far Apart records a shared struggle between young people in diverse cities, countries and continents as they became lost in the uncertainty of the future (see Appendix 1: Shock).⁴

In the 2020s – particularly in Latin America where there was little or no access to traditional mental health interventions such as talking therapies – arts organisations and creative practices were already playing an important role in supporting young people’s mental health. Before the pandemic, arts organisations were already beginning to conceptualise how the participatory activities they provided might support recovery and build resilience of young people’s mental wellbeing, providing a space for them ‘to make sense of their fears, communicate with others, and feel a sense of social solidarity’ (Kukkonen, 2021: 4). Through their artwork the young people revealed the importance of committing, playing around, creating, crafting, talking to people with the same goal and producing something collectively (Figure 6.2). Pandemic-related postponement of live performances and events inadvertently increased opportunities for experimentation in digital arenas, and young people reported being given more time to explore creative activities without the pressure of committing to challenging deadlines. Even though the participants discovered that a digital space could never replace the power of a face-to-face connection, many of the young people who participated in the Far Apart research reported finding a platform for sparking or strengthening relationships, as well as establishing a common ground that was often more familiar to them than to the arts organisations themselves. The works show a transition from the shock of uncertainty at the beginning of the pandemic to the testing of hope as a creative practice (Appendix 2: Hope).

Figure 6.2Spoken word draft by a young participant of the in-person session part of Far Apart UK workshops delivered by Battersea Arts Centre (London, England), 2021.

The archive also gives an insight into what young people feared about a future beyond the coronavirus pandemic: the risk of losing what they had gained from the pain of the lockdowns and the sense of engagement they felt as they participated in collective responses to a global crisis (Appendix 3: Fear). Each of the countries where the Far Apart research took place emerged differently in the years following the pandemic, with the governments of Fernández (elected President of Argentina in October 2019), Castillo (elected President of Peru in June 2021), Petro (elected President of Colombia in June 2022) and Lula (elected President of Brazil in October 2022) leading a Latin American resurgence of progressive reforms. Despite the occasional reverses, the subsequent four decades have gradually seen a reconceptualization of Latin America’s arts and cultural heritage, which has responded to what the young people involved in the Far Apart research hoped to see beyond the pandemic. This has included extensive investment in arts and creative activities, both in and out of formal education, as part of an integrated cultural-medical strategy to alleviate anxiety and depression amongst young people. The benefits of a creative and compassionate approach to health and wellbeing that many countries in Latin America enjoy in 2063 contrasts with the abandonment of public and universal healthcare that has taken place in England over the last 40 years. Amongst the newly independent nations of the former UK, Wales has shown itself to be most open to the ‘Latin Americanisation of healthcare’, as the integration of arts and public health has become universally known. The visionary concept enshrined in the Welsh Assembly’s Well-being of Future Generations Act in 2015 meant Wales was better prepared to enact the necessary reforms beyond the pandemic. With a focus on the long-term impact of government decisions, the Well-being of Future Generations Act insisted that public agencies work more closely with people, communities and each other in order to prevent persistent problems such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change. The ground-breaking Welsh legislation of 2015 has meant that nearly 50 years later, Wales has a public health system that recognises the long-term benefits of the arts and the preventative role they play in mental health resilience and recovery.

It is the testimonies of the young people from the Far Apart research that compel us to ask what has been learnt from this global crisis. Looking back, can we identify which countries used the experience of the pandemic to create a radical rethink about the value of the arts and creativity? Has learning from 2022 informed policies which ensure that young people are more resilient to the mental health challenges we continue to face in 2063?

Far Apart: Findings from the archive

Far Apart developed a multidisciplinary methodological framework, using research instruments from across the fields of arts, economics and psychiatry. Developed in consultation with the ten collaborating arts organisations in Latin America and the UK, Far Apart used mixed methods – qualitative interviews, an online survey and creative workshops⁵ – to explore the impact of shifting to the online delivery of creative activities on young people and arts facilitators. The data collection was the same across all ten sites in Latin America and the UK, and the quantitative analysis used the same method of descriptive statistical analysis for both regions. The qualitative thematic analysis was constructed around concise, well-defined themes identified in Latin America, which were then used to guide the development of the interviews in the UK, where a thematic content analysis was used.

The Far Apart archive provides a detailed account of the data collection and analysis undertaken in 2020–22.⁶ The survey was open between April and June 2021 in Latin America and between July and August 2021 in the UK. Its design was based on responses obtained from semi-structured interviews with young people who took part in creative activities with ten arts organisations from six countries before and during the coronavirus pandemic. The survey mainly explored young people’s participation in online activities during the coronavirus pandemic and was applied to participants from each of the five arts organisations using a convenience sample. A total of 239 young people were interviewed in Latin America and 141 young people in the UK.

Participants self-reported their mental health during the pandemic and at the time of the survey, which found that over 40% of the participants experienced low moods and anxiety during the pandemic.⁷ There was also consistency in their responses about how online activity diminished young people’s experiences of engaging with arts organisations: they missed physical contact with their peers, found it more difficult to express themselves and had less focus and confidence in their participation online than in-person. However, there was an overwhelming enthusiasm from the Latin American respondents for online arts activities, with 91% indicating their desire to rejoin in the future, while only 27% of young people interviewed in the UK expressed a similar intention. This divergence is even more remarkable given the challenges of accessing arts workshops online in contexts with greater digital inequality. The Latin American respondents consistently gave more positive feedback on the success of online workshops than those in the UK. This may reflect how most of the respondents identified the internet as being an essential tool for social organisations and movements based in the lower-income communities in Latin America. Research undertaken in Latin America during the pandemic suggested that stay-in-place and other mobility restrictions ‘generated a renewed and innovative social mobilization in the digital space, notwithstanding the deep digital divide in the region’ (Duque Franco et al., 2020: 541).

More differences emerged in the reasons why the young people interviewed took part in arts activities online. In Latin America, most respondents reported that they wanted to feel happy, less bored and to do something outside of their routine, with a strong emphasis on relaxation, distraction and enjoyment. Feeling better about yourself was also often cited by the UK respondents, but that sentiment sat alongside a desire to develop skills and pursue a career (not mentioned in the Latin American interviews that guided the survey design). The sample is small, but the researchers at the time noted that the responses in the UK and Latin America indicated a different purpose for young people’s engagement in the arts, which is reflected in the divergent ways arts policy, funding and practices have developed in subsequent years at the sites in which the original research took place (Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3Urban art intervention by a young participant of the Far Apart Latin America workshops delivered by Crear Vale la Pena (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 2020.

Further analysis was produced from the qualitative data. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 44 young people and 45 staff members over a five-month period between August–December 2020 in Latin America, and with 46 young people, 28 staff members and 16 stakeholders over a four-month period between March–June 2021 in the UK. Purposive sampling was used to ensure diversity across participants. It is these interviews that provide a reflective account of young people’s perceptions of impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

All interviews were conducted online via ‘Zoom’, a long-forgotten videoconferencing platform. The researchers report that the most important resource for the participants was a stable internet connection, combined with a device that was suitable for such communication at the time: a computer, smartphone or tablet. It is clear from the field notes included in the archive that video-recorded interviews created challenges for the research team, as the connection quality was patchy and, since interviews were conducted in people’s homes, there were frequent interruptions.

Thematic content analysis was chosen as a methodology to guide the analysis of the data in 2022. A coding framework was constructed using NVivo (a software programme used for qualitative data analysis) to identify trends and themes in the data, and later to classify those codes into overarching themes. It is this methodology which produced a comparison and contrast of testimonies through different themes or subtopics, using the verbatim data from the interviews to guide the generation of the codes, as well as the questions from the topic guide.

The Far Apart archive groups the findings from the research in the UK into four topic areas: the impact of lockdown and social distancing; strategies for coping and engagement; key learning and challenges; general recommendations. Themes that emerged in Latin America were consistently present in the UK data and would later contribute to shaping the policy recommendations and practice guidelines: practical problems need to be overcome; ongoing staff support is essential; online arts activities are helpful in a stressful context (coronavirus pandemic); online arts activities compete with other online activities but bring different benefits and opportunities; connecting online is not the same as face-to-face.

The practical problems of internet connectivity and limited data now seem archaic, but the inequalities of access to arts activities remain resonant. Most striking in the research is the way in which online experiences revealed new aspects of the young people’s home lives, how those impacted on the arts activities and how the arts organisations gained insight into the interface between their programmes and young people’s domestic lives. The Latin American respondents consistently drew attention to the way in which online activities opened a complex space between public/private life. Multiple-occupancy rooms in poor domestic infrastructures reduced or removed privacy, compelling several young people to leave their homes and find spaces where they could freely express themselves, without surveillance by family members. However, young people also reported that parents were understanding and played an important role in trying to solve such issues by allowing them to use larger house spaces for the digital performances created during the project.

A common difficulty that was faced by those lacking dedicated spaces were the multiple distractions found in their homes. This prevented them from fully concentrating on the activities as they would if they were participating in-person.

Whereas in Latin America, despite such disruptive set-ups, young people experienced arts activities as a form of escape, in the UK, young people who had difficult home lives spoke of the negative impact of being forced to engage with arts activities online at home. This was challenging for many as they did not have the same emotional, physical or creative outlet. There was an additional sense from some that they were self-conscious of their living situations or the home environment. This led to many young people not turning on their cameras, which limited engagement, or not participating with online activities at all. But referring to what they called ‘the spectrum of impact’ (Heritage et al., 2022: 28), the UK researchers noted that some young people (especially those who are shy and reluctant to connect) talked of feeling safer when they were engaging in online spaces than in-person. They were able to stay in the comfort of their own homes and were in control of their level of engagement.

Additionally, the digital space was one that young people in the 2020s were already more familiar with than were the adult artists leading the workshops. For some young people, the combined notion of being online and working from within their own personal space was empowering.

A significant difference between the findings from Latin America and the UK was that young people in Cardiff, London and Manchester consistently talked about losing their connection with their local arts organisations. While they were grateful to be able to continue their engagement online, for most of the UK respondents the level of connection with other people and with their artform decreased over time. The Latin American respondents registered a similar reduction, but also pointed to the positive impacts of the digital delivery:

The young people across all the sites highlighted how the arts workers at each organisation were essential during the transition from in-person to online activities, not least in translating the safe and supportive in-person environments to online platforms. One of the most common strategies to keep the participants engaged in the online activities, despite all the technical issues brought by digital platforms, was the arts workers constantly reaching out and motivating them through social media and instant messaging applications.

Forty years have passed since the coronavirus pandemic, but the research offers testimony to the efforts of youth arts workers who kept in close contact with the young people. In the interviews, young people identify how the staff were key to keeping them interested in the arts activities and strengthening emotional ties. In all cities, interviewed participants found comfort and emotional support during the pandemic while they were actively engaged in arts activities, which expanded their bonds with the facilitators and teachers.

Meanwhile the youth arts workers themselves registered a variety of negative mental health symptoms. In the UK, they experienced a diminished sense of morale as organisations were forced to make staff cuts that disproportionately affected people in the organisation who were more locally based, culturally diverse, and on lower incomes. It was those most in need who were most significantly affected by the cuts. The research clearly shows that UK organisations that decided to furlough staff or make redundancies experienced a significant shift in staff morale, which then had an impact on how they could support young people.

In Latin America, the interviews reveal that working from home secluded youth arts workers from regular in-person contact with young people and peers, causing stress and worry. Not being able to properly support young people discouraged them, while having to deal with technological issues without the support they needed for their duties made them feel more distressed and mentally debilitated.

In addition, youth arts workers’ own experiences of unreliable internet access negatively affected their daily work life. They had to learn how to cope with no longer being able to control the success of their classes. Significant increases to workload, with several professionals losing track of how much time they were committing to work, also affected their personal lives and home management. Such challenges were reflected in the increase of youth arts workers’ feelings of anxiety, stress, loneliness and exhaustion.

The Far Apart archive registers diverse and often destabilising challenges brought by the pandemic across all ten cities, but also identifies what young people recognised as the positive results of the support offered by arts organisations. The research shows that while social isolation and other restrictive measures deeply affected young people’s lives, online creative activities generated an important space for participants to manage feelings of stress. Their daily routine and social life were abruptly interrupted, at a time when such interactions play a crucial part in their development as individuals, so the arts organisations offered a structured means of maintaining contact with other young people.

The young interviewees also recognised that the arts organisations were supporting them to find suitable ways to express their emotions. While engaging in these activities, participants could temporarily disconnect themselves from the news reports, avoiding the perpetuation of feelings such as fear and anxiety.

The research identified transformational processes by which youth arts organisations were constantly reviewing what was working within the structure of their organisation and using the experience of the pandemic to rethink their engagement with young people. Although it could be a difficult, distressing process, youth arts workers reported that going online created new opportunities for adapting different tools, which improved their creative and teaching skills.

In the UK, the research revealed that there were more barriers to innovation for larger, venue-based organisations. Smaller organisations, particularly those without a venue, were able to transition to an online space more quickly than larger organisations. Organisations with smaller teams and fewer overheads were able to make swifter decisions and did not have to spend as much time figuring out how to keep the organisation afloat. In general, staff from smaller organisations felt a higher level of satisfaction with their work during the pandemic, as they were still able to make an impact. In larger organisations, on the other hand, staff reported feelings of frustration and depleted motivation due to pandemic-related uncertainties as well as a lack of leadership focus. In general, larger organisations were busy maintaining themselves while smaller organisations were able to concentrate on innovating.

This difference did not emerge in the Latin American research. As the pandemic imposed an abrupt shift to the virtual, not all of the participating arts organisations in Latin America could create appropriate mechanisms to support their staff and ease their transition to new ways of working. Some workers received direct or indirect financial assistance, training and materials to help to guide their online work, but in general, youth arts workers in Latin America reported having to learn things on their own during the transition process.

All the arts workers talked of missing their face-to-face work routine, but the Latin Americans highlighted the benefits that emerged from virtual interdisciplinary teamwork. They felt that their teams had been strengthened during the pandemic, allowing them to feel closer as an organic institution and develop an increased understanding of the arts organisation itself.

Lessons learned

The Far Apart archive provides a framework for how we can measure the achievements and limitations of cultural policies and arts practices that have been variously implemented and rejected in the 40 years since this research was undertaken. The researchers – artists and academics – made a series of recommendations based on the findings of their research, which were presented at a series of public events with stakeholders across the research sites. One important question remains: what can we learn from the research in 2063?

Far Apart reflected on whether the coronavirus pandemic was an opportunity to reset the social agenda of arts organisations across several cities in Latin America and in the former UK. During the social transformations of 2020–22, the research registered a need for the repositioning of the arts and their role in society. The shift towards recognising the importance of art as a tool for resilience and recovery brought each of the arts organisations closer to an activist aesthetic as the pandemic opened a space in which a diversity of arts and cultural activities were repurposed and publicly acknowledged as part of society’s system of care.

Given the way in which Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru have pioneered the integration of creative and cultural engagement into their public care systems over the last four decades, it seems reasonable to describe the recommendations arising from the Far Apart research as the Latin Americanisation of the arts. The final report recommended that policymakers should ‘lean into art’s social purpose’. Building on the notion of creativity as a process, it argued that arts organisations were well-placed to address a range of social issues. The research showed how arts organisations created a new repertoire of collective actions by opening their venues as food banks or vaccination centres and registered a shift in thinking towards public acknowledgement of how creativity is a common tool for connection with wider societal care, welfare and security issues. At the same time, it urged caution and the need to recognise that what arts organisations offer may not work for everyone and that arts activities need to be integrated into other support systems. The study demonstrated that the arts were just one tool in a large box. Far Apart’s conclusions looked to future government policy that would incentivise arts and other social and community organisations to connect in ways that are more fruitful, strategic and long-term. While the pandemic strengthened the social role of arts organisations, the research recognised the urgent need for attention to policy changes, alongside the training and support that would be needed to enable staff and venues to make the necessary transitions for them to be integrated into systems of care.

It was impossible for anyone who participated in this research in the 2020s to imagine that brutal political and societal changes would create such different directions of travel for arts policy and practice in Latin America and the former UK. At the time this research was undertaken, the participants were still in a state of intense insecurity and shared a common struggle. The research was produced by and promoted inter-regional cooperation whilst strengthening regional collaborations, which at the time was seen as an essential characteristic of coordinated responses to the pandemic. The research was not confident that what was being observed in the two years between 2020 and 2022 would herald the necessary revolution in which the arts would come to play a pivotal role in supporting the mental health of young participants.

As the recently crowned Nobel Laureate Ocean Vuong reminds us, ‘Time is a Mother’.⁹ The 40 years that separate us from the stories told by the data produced in Far Apart allow us to see the deeper currents and visceral social cracks that the crises provoked by the pandemic exposed. Those stories are ones that we can learn from in 2063, as we continue to explore how the collective practices of the arts can be part of the new formation of collective action that we still need to confront our own emerging catastrophe.