Introduction to Special Issue on Mental Health and Mental Illness in Physical Education and Youth Sport

The idea for this special issue of European Physical Education Review preceded the current global Covid-19 pandemic which has unquestioningly exposed and amplified the deeply entrenched inequalities that characterise many countries around the world, and that were already widening before the beginning of the pandemic (e.g. Marmot et al., 2020; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2018). Worsening social, health and educational inequalities have been identified as especially important, and while impacting all social groups, they disproportionately disadvantage the least well-off who are already most vulnerable to poor health (including mental health) and other social problems (Campion et al., 2020; Centre for Mental Health, 2020; Marmot et al., 2020; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2018). In some countries, deaths involving Covid-19 have been shown to be much higher among those in the most deprived communities: in England, between 1 March and 31 May 2020, the agestandardised mortality rate of deaths involving Covid-19 was more than double in the most deprived areas, and in Wales the rate was nearly twice as high (Office for National Statistics, 2020). As Campion et al. (2020: 1) have noted, the ‘rapid global spread of Covid-19 is having wide ranging effects on population mental health’, and pandemics such as this are associated with increased risk of mental disorders and poor mental wellbeing. These risks, they argue, are mediated by ‘socioeconomic inequalities, poverty, debt, unemployment, food insecurity, social factors, quarantine, physical distancing, and physical inactivity’ (Campion et al., 2020: 1), including among children and young people (CYP) and their families. In an educational context, the Education Endowment Foundation (2020) have argued that school closures resulting from the Covid19 related lockdown in the UK, for example, will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged