When crises collide, the damage does not simply add up — it multiplies. That is the central warning emerging from a new qualitative interview study published in BMC Public Health, in which Finnish school social workers describe how the so-called polycrisis, the entanglement of the COVID-19 pandemic with economic, geopolitical and social upheavals, has reshaped the mental landscape of the adolescents they serve. The researchers, Ville Mutka of the City of Helsinki Education Division, Anne Kouvonen of the University of Helsinki and Queen’s University Belfast, and Hilla Nordquist of the University of Eastern Finland and South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, interviewed thirteen school social workers who had worked with adolescents aged ten to nineteen both before and during the crisis years. Their accounts paint a picture of distress that is not only more widespread but qualitatively different: more complex, arriving at younger ages, and increasingly tangled with a corroding sense of trust in society and the future.
The concept of the polycrisis has gained traction among researchers and policymakers to describe a situation in which multiple crises interact so that their combined effect exceeds the sum of their parts. For adolescents, the pandemic was never a single isolated shock. It arrived on top of climate anxiety, economic insecurity, geopolitical tension and the accelerating pressures of digital life. The Finnish study set out to capture what this entanglement means on the ground, in the everyday practice of professionals whose job is to spot distress in students and intervene before it hardens into something worse. Because school social work in Finland remains a comparatively under-researched field, and because little is known anywhere about school social work during a pandemic, the study offers a rare window into how intertwined crises propagate through the institutions closest to young people’s lives.
The methodological design was deliberately grounded in lived professional experience. The thirteen participants were required to have worked with adolescents across the divide of the polycrisis, allowing them to compare before and after rather than reconstruct a single snapshot. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, the researchers identified recurring patterns describing how adolescent well-being had changed and how the social workers’ own practice had shifted in response. Qualitative designs of this kind do not measure prevalence in a statistical sense, but they excel at revealing mechanisms — the how and why of change — which is precisely what the polycrisis framework demands. The study followed the good scientific practice defined by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity and the Helsinki Declaration, with written informed consent obtained from all participants.
What the social workers described, according to the study’s results, is a diversification of the sources of adolescent distress and, crucially, of the interactions between those sources. Sub-crises of the polycrisis appear to have intertwined, so that a student struggling with pandemic-disrupted schooling might simultaneously face family economic strain, climate-related dread and a fragmented social life. The reported consequence is a pattern of intensified mental health symptoms, growing social challenges and a pervasive fear of the future, all reinforced by weakened social trust. In other words, the crises did not merely stack; they fed one another, with each source of stress amplifying the others in ways that single-crisis models fail to anticipate.
One of the most striking findings concerns age. The social workers reported seeing complex symptom profiles at younger ages than before the polycrisis, a shift that suggests the burden of intertwined crises is not confined to older teenagers on the cusp of adulthood but is reaching downward into early adolescence. This matters for public health planning because the developmental window of early adolescence is a period of heightened sensitivity to social environment, and disruptions during this period can have long-lasting consequences. The finding also complicates the work of school-based professionals, who must now recognize and respond to presentations of distress that are more layered than those they were trained to expect.
The effects on the professionals themselves were equally concrete. The study documents growing caseloads among Finnish school social workers and a marked shift of their work toward mental health support. This reallocation of effort is significant for the structure of student welfare services: when practitioners are pulled increasingly into crisis response and mental health work, other core functions of school social work, such as preventive work, community building and support for families, risk being squeezed. The Finnish case is instructive precisely because the country has long been regarded as having a strong and well-integrated student welfare system; if the polycrisis is straining that system, the implications for countries with fewer resources are sobering.
Perhaps the most conceptually important contribution of the study lies in its linking of social trust to future-oriented anxiety and beliefs in one’s own efficacy. The authors conclude that adolescent students’ social trust is closely connected to how they feel about the future and to their confidence in their own capacity to act, and that these in turn influence mental health outcomes. This chain — from trust in society, through hope and self-efficacy, to psychological well-being — offers a mechanistic account of why abstract macro-level crises register so powerfully in individual teenage minds. When the social world appears unreliable, the future appears threatening, and when the future appears threatening, young people’s belief in their own agency erodes, taking mental health with it.
This finding reframes what might otherwise be dismissed as generational pessimism. If social trust functions as a psychological resource for adolescents, then the erosion of that trust is not merely a sociological curiosity but a clinical risk factor. The authors argue that future research should examine the broader effects of social trust, including its interaction with political decision-making. That is a notable call: it implies that the decisions of governments — how they communicate during crises, how they distribute burdens, how credibly they address long-term threats such as climate change — may be part of the causal pathway shaping adolescent mental health, not just background context.
The study also underscores the pivotal role of schools as the front line of adolescent well-being support during global crises. Schools are among the few institutions that reach nearly all young people regardless of family circumstances, and the student welfare services embedded within them are often the first place where distress becomes visible to an adult outside the home. The authors emphasize that, given the cruciality of schools in supporting adolescent well-being, it is essential to investigate strategies for enhancing school engagement and preventing absenteeism during global crises. Absenteeism is both a symptom and an amplifier: students who disengage from school lose access to the very social connections and support structures that could buffer them against the polycrisis, creating a feedback loop of withdrawal and worsening well-being.
For a field that has often treated crises one at a time — a pandemic study here, a climate anxiety study there — the Finnish findings argue for a fundamentally integrated approach. The polycrisis is not a rhetorical flourish but an operational reality for the professionals working with young people, and its signature is visible in the complexity, precocity and distrust-laden character of the distress they encounter. The study’s conclusions point toward a research and policy agenda in which social trust, school engagement and mental health are treated as an interconnected system rather than separate silos. If the social workers interviewed here are accurate witnesses — and their before-and-after vantage point gives that testimony unusual weight — then protecting adolescent well-being in an age of overlapping crises will require protecting the foundations of trust itself, in classrooms, in institutions and in the promises societies make to their young.
Subject of Research: Adolescent well-being and school social work during the polycrisis in Finland
Article Title: Adolescent well-being in the context of the polycrisis, through the lens of school social workers’ practice in Finland – a qualitative interview study
Article References: Mutka, V., Kouvonen, A., & Nordquist, H. (2026). Adolescent well-being in the context of the polycrisis, through the lens of school social workers’ practice in Finland – a qualitative interview study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29662-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29662-6
Keywords: polycrisis, adolescents, well-being, mental health, school social workers, student welfare services, social trust, future-oriented anxiety, school engagement, absenteeism, Finland, qualitative interview study
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Glenn Wilkins. (October 1, 2026). School Social Workers Sound the Alarm as the Polycrisis Erodes Teen Well-Being. Scienmag. https://scienmag.com/school-social-workers-sound-the-alarm-as-the-polycrisis-erodes-teen-well-being/
Glenn Wilkins. “School Social Workers Sound the Alarm as the Polycrisis Erodes Teen Well-Being.” Scienmag, 1 October 2026, https://scienmag.com/school-social-workers-sound-the-alarm-as-the-polycrisis-erodes-teen-well-being/. Accessed 1 October 2026.
Glenn Wilkins. “School Social Workers Sound the Alarm as the Polycrisis Erodes Teen Well-Being.” Scienmag. October 1, 2026. https://scienmag.com/school-social-workers-sound-the-alarm-as-the-polycrisis-erodes-teen-well-being/
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Tags: absenteeismadolescent trust in societyadolescentscomplex adolescent distressCOVID-19 pandemic effects on youtheffects of economic and geopolitical crises on teensFinlandfuture-oriented anxietyMental healthmental health during global crisesmulti-crisis societal impact on youthpolycrisispolycrisis impact on adolescentsqualitative interview studyqualitative study on teen mental healthschool engagementschool social workersschool social workers insightsschool-based mental health supportsocial truststudent welfare servicesteen mental healthwell-beingyouth well-being amidst upheavals
