A rapidly increasing number of students in Japan have posted about feeling tired or groggy on social media since schools reopened nationwide in June, according to analyses of about 400 million tweets, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
Schools in urban areas were forced to close for about three months and universities conducted online lectures because of the coronavirus.
The data indicates that young people are being negatively impacted by the situation and are feeling physically and mentally exhausted.
The analyses were done on the tweets that were posted between July 2018 and late June of this year by Tokyo-based NTT Data Corp. The company's Nazuki service system, which is used to analyze data for these kinds of situations, was utilized to examine tweets posted by students aged 13 to 22 during the two-year period. Students had posted about 400 million tweets since July 2018 using keywords such as "school," "junior high school," "high school," "university" and "classes." Among them, about 3.51 million tweets mentioned physical or mental disorders.
The tweets during the first five weekdays after a long break were analyzed and divided into four groups: after spring break, after the Golden Week holidays, after summer vacation and after winter vacation. The data were then analyzed by how many and what kinds of tweets were posted.
It was interesting to see that the number of tweets indicating that students felt both mentally and physically tired or groggy had increased.
There were 8,855 tweets from students indicating they felt fatigued between June 1 and June 5, when students slowly began going back to school in Japan, compared to 1,401 tweets from the same period last year.
The second-largest number of similar tweets were seen on weekdays after the end of spring break in 2019, but the number was less than half at 3,616.
There were 4,302 tweets from students indicating they felt groggy between June 1 and 5, compared with 1,655 in the previous year. It was the highest number within the two-year period.
There were 13,157 tweets from students indicating they felt tired or groggy between June 1 and 5, which is more than double compared to the 6,123 tweets after spring break in 2019.
"I feel groggy before going to school, and feel tired again when I go home," and "I feel groggy because I have a lot of assignments from the online lectures," are two such tweets that were posted on Twitter after school reopened.
"[Students] generally become more stressed in spring when school starts, however, this year has been more serious, partly because of the impact of schools being closed for a longer period," Prof. Mafumi Usui of Niigata Seiryo University, who is an expert of sociopsychology with knowledge about the mental health of young people, said. "In a normal year, they would have entered summer vacation by now, but that has been drastically shortened. It is concerning that the physical and mental burden on students will only increase from here on out."
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