Highland business founder Alan McLeod says the long term effects of lockdown on young people are still being overlooked as new research highlights worrying trends among the youngest generation.
McLeod, who created the Inverness based company X&, says the findings published this week by Edinburgh University on the impact of the pandemic on toddlers echo what he has observed in older children and young adults across the Highlands and beyond.
He believes many young people are still living with what he calls Lockdown Block, a psychological barrier that has prevented them from moving forward after the pandemic.
McLeod says he established X& to help support those who felt left behind during lockdown and created an AI companionship tool as part of the response.
Alan explained that since lockdown his family and many others have watched their children continuing to isolate in their homes.
“Some children continue to self-exclude in their rooms with fundamental mental health challenges, no jobs, no qualifications, no money, no bank account, nothing.
“But highly intelligent.
“Often gamers and part of an off radar movement that fear the worst.
“The numbers are frightening.”
He has sourced evidence from the House of Commons Library which confirms that around one million people under the age of 24 are currently classed as NEETs, meaning they are not in employment, education or training.
“Inspired to address this, I created X& in early 2024, pronounced ‘x and’.
“I believed there was a tribe of Gen Zs who all shared one major thing in common: they’d been exiled by lockdown.
“Closely following behind is Gen Alpha, equally disillusioned.
“This is being confirmed by the likes of Edinburgh University.”
X& integrates companionship and inspiring support alongside tribal identity and a sub cultural ecosystem shaped around the experiences of young people who feel disconnected.
McLeod says the psychological foundations of X& come from LifeLaws, a leadership and development programme he created in the 1990s.
“Part of my solution to this crisis was to be persuaded to build an artificial intelligence companion tool that supports us in our work and is now the portal into the X& online tribe.”
His wider hypothesis is that lockdown acted as an emotional block for a minority of young people who were already carrying unresolved trauma before the pandemic.
“My hypothesis and business solution is that lockdown was and is a block for a minority of people who had been possessed with a trauma in the lead-up to the pandemic.
“What most of us do is to use time, people, places, etcetera, to get to grips with our trauma, learn to try and live with it and move on.
“To understand my theory, I forced myself to go back and remember how I survived such trauma.
“I moved forward.
“We all moved.
“But Gen Zs couldn’t.
“Lockdown blocked this process, especially teenagers in school.
“Thus, my theory is called Lockdown Block.”
He describes Lockdown Block as a weight carried inside the mind which traps emotional experiences that would normally be processed through everyday life.
Alan claims Lockdown Block burdens a part of the mental faculties in an inner prison.
“Each and every X& I have encountered has something locked-in by Lockdown Block.
“Death, bullying, a broken heart, shame, unresolved anger, the list goes on and on.
“Dealing with pubescent trauma is a Rite of Passage.
“Lockdown blocked the Rite and locked-in the trauma.
“The Passage has yet to begin.
“X& helps make the journey.”
