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We document mental and social distress of children, adolescents and adults, using data on 3 million calls to German helplines between January 2019 and May 2022. High-frequency data from crisis helpline logs offer rich information on the evolution of “revealed distress” among the most vulnerable, unaffected by researchers’ study design and framing. Distress of adults, measured by the volume of calls, rose significantly after both the outbreak of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In contrast, the overall revealed distress of children and adolescents did not increase during those crises. The nature of young people’s concerns, however, changed more strongly than for adults after the COVID-19 outbreak. Consistent with the effects of social distancing, call topics of young people shifted from problems with school and peers to problems with family and mental health. We find the share of severe mental health problems among young people to have increased with a delay, in the second and third year of the pandemic.

We examine the effect of class cleavages on terrorist activity by anarchist and leftist terrorist groups in 99 countries over the 1860-1950 period. We find that higher levels of political exclusion of the poor, our main measure of class conflict, were associated with higher levels of social-revolutionary terrorist activity during this time period. This finding is robust to an instrumental-variable approach and further robustness checks. We argue that class cleavages -in the form of the monopolization of political power by the rich -perpetuated and exacerbated the socio-economic ordeal of the poor, while simultaneously curtailing their means to effect relief in the ordinary political process. Consistent with our expectations, this provoked terrorist violence by groups whose ideological orientation highlighted concerns over class conflict, economic equality and the political participation of the poor. Indeed, our empirical analysis also shows that terrorist groups motivated by other ideologies (e.g. extreme nationalism) did not respond to political exclusion of the poor in the same manner, which further emphasizes the role of ideological inclinations in the terrorist response to class antagonisms.

We document mental and social distress of children, adolescents and adults in times of crisis, using data on 3 million helpline calls between January 2019 and May 2022. Detailed and high-frequency data from crisis helpline logs offer rich information on the evolution of distress among the most vulnerable. They represent a unique measure of "revealed distress", unaffected by researchers' study design and framing. Revealed distress of adults, measured by the volume of calls, rose significantly after both the outbreak of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In contrast, the overall revealed distress of children and adolescents has not increased during those crises. The nature of young people's concerns, however, changed more strongly than for adults, with conversations shifting from problems with school and peers to family and mental health problems. Call topics of young people shifted from problems with school and peers towards problems with family and mental health. We find the share of severe mental-health problems among young people to have increased with a delay, in the second and third year of the pandemic.

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