Class of COVID: Leah Likin dives deep into pandemic anxieties with her honors project

With the COVID-19 national public health emergency officially coming to an end just two weeks ago, members of UCLA ’s class of 2023 will be the first to graduate having spent most, if not all, of their academic years living through a pandemic — and all the uncertainties, anxieties, and physical and mental health challenges that has entailed. Among those graduates will be fourth-year psychology major Leah Likin, who has mined these experiences for her highly original and deeply personal honors capstone project, which has won a Dean ’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Creativity as part of UCLA’s current 10th annualUndergraduate Research Week.Likin ’s experiences and, in particular, her struggles with mental health during the pandemic — which at their worst necessitated inpatient psychiatric treatment — served as a springboard for the ambitious project, which in addition to more traditional research and data collection also incorporated poetry, personal writing and art.The goal, she said, was not only to explore the factors that led to her mental health crisis in August 2022 but, importantly, to focus on and quantify how these same factors had affected others during the pandemic. So she began compiling data that would tell that story.“I just researched things that affected me deeply and affected my family dynamic,” she said.As part of her project, Likin interviewed 15 people, ranging in age from 20 to 86, about a number of topics, including COVID-19, ment...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news