According to his father, Hayden Hunstable, a 12-year-old of Aledo, Texas, was a happy, friendly boy with no signs of depression. Then came the statewide lockdown on March 19, 2020, and increasingly, Hayden was left feeling lonely.
On April 17, Hayden committed suicide; his 8-year-old sister, Kinlee, found him hanging in the bedroom. What a shattering experience for the family. Hayden's father blames the lockdown and school closures for what happened to his son.
In our family, the youngest granddaughter was negatively affected by Western Australia's lockdown in March and April 2020, which lasted for seven weeks. Imagine the message sent out to children like my 9-year-old granddaughter:
You can't go to school.
You can't socialize with your friends.
People need to wear masks.
What is the message here? Fear and more fear.
When schools did reopen, my granddaughter refused to go. She wouldn't go to shops, and an ordinarily effusive and intelligent girl retreated into a shell of isolation. Thankfully, over time, she overcame the emotional trauma.
Whether it is the Premier of Western Australia, Mr McGown, the Victorian Premier, Mr Andrews, or the Governor of Michigan, Whitmer, these people are guilty of child abuse. Schools should never have closed. We've known for a long time that Covid-19 is not significant for children? We even recently had an extraordinary situation where West Australia had one case of Covid in the whole state. The Premier instituted a one-week lockdown with the closure of schools—insanity. To create fear in our children is to abuse them.
Children are already primed with a fear of the future—the constant indoctrination of global warming and claims that the world will end in the next decade is a major one. Greta Thunberg amplified this fear. The Covid pandemic has exploded emotions of fear, isolation, and hopelessness in our young. Many children lost sleep because of the emotional toll. Worse still, childhood suicides have skyrocketed.
I stated that leaders need to be held accountable for child abuse. So what is child abuse? There are the apparent physical and sexual assaults of children; however, the American Psychological Association also describes psychological abuse. The is in the form of neglecting a child's educational needs. It is also to physically or socially isolate a child and limit opportunities to socialize with others.
Psychiatrists who specialize in children state that there has been a significant uptick in depression and anxiety in children, including an increase in suicides in Australia. Lifeline, Kids Helpline and Beyond Blue have seen a record number of calls in people seeking help.
In the U.S., a recent White Paper by Fair Health, which has access to many insurance databases, has described the seriousness of school closures' consequences. In the 13 to 18 age group, insurance claims for intentional self-harm were up 90% in March of 2020 compared to the previous year. The claims related to drug overdoses went up 95% in March 2020 and 113% in April. Those numbers remained elevated through the fall. Generalized anxiety disorders increased 93.6 as a percentage of all medical claim lines over April 2019. Statistically, the coronavirus lockdowns caused children to be 10 times more likely to die from suicide than from the coronavirus itself
The doctors who put out the Barrington Declaration stated that societal lockdowns are devastating on many levels. Considering that there has not been one Covid death in anyone under 20 in Australia shows the destructiveness of across the board shutdowns. The rational thing to do is to quarantine those who are most vulnerable, not children. Every year children die of the flu, but they are relatively immune to Covid.
Age Distribution Of Covid Deaths in Australia
During some flu outbreaks, as many as 30% of children have been at home sick with the flu. Why is it that we didn't close those schools? Logically we isolate the sick children at home and let the healthy ones stay in school.
When it comes to lockdowns, by any measure, they have been destructive to children. In some U.S. states, children have not been to school for a year. On so many levels, it's child abuse and those who instituted such policies, whether politicians or medical bureaucrats, need to be held accountable.
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