Module control in youth symptom networks across COVID-19

TL;DR

This study examined how youth mental health symptom networks changed during COVID-19, finding stable community structures but shifting control patterns across different symptom domains over time.

Contribution

It reveals that while the overall modular structure of youth symptom networks remains stable during prolonged stress, control shifts across symptom domains, highlighting dynamic reorganization.

Findings

Symptom community organization remained broadly conserved across COVID-19 phases.

Intermodule control shifted from stress-focused to more distributed across emotional, cognitive, and social symptoms.

Node strength showed high stability, while within-module control was less consistent.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed young people to a prolonged and evolving societal stressor, yet it remains unclear whether symptom networks were reorganized or whether control was redistributed across a conserved modular scaffold. Here we analysed repeated cross-sectional data on 47 self-reported mental-health symptoms from 14,181 U.S. young adults aged 18-24 years across five COVID-19 phases between 2020 and 2023. For each phase, we estimated Gaussian graphical models, identified symptom communities, and characterized minimum-dominating-set-based module control. Symptom networks showed broadly conserved community organization across phases, indicating a stable mesoscale scaffold despite marked temporal variation. By contrast, intermodule control shifted from an early configuration centered on stress-related symptoms to a later, more distributed pattern spanning emotional, cognitive and social domains. Resampling analyses showed high stability for node strength and moderate stability for module-to-module control, whereas average within-module control was less robust. These findings suggest that prolonged crisis may preserve the modular architecture of youth psychopathology while redistributing control across symptom domains, and they identify intermodule control as a comparatively robust mesoscale feature for cross-phase comparison.