LONDON, ENGLAND – JANUARY 03: Ambulances sit outside Guy’s Accident and Emergency Department … [+]
According to a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry.
“The pandemic exacerbated youth stressors, including social isolation, school disruptions and parental unemployment, and rates of depression and anxiety have doubled since the start of the pandemic. By 2021, 20% of high school students seriously considered suicide, and 9% attempted suicide,” the researchers wrote.
To examine how serious the mental health crisis will become in 2021, the team closely examined private health insurance claims filed from March 2019 to February 2022. The researchers analyzed a sample of 4.1 million children and adolescents. Fifty-one percent of them were male and 41% were between 13 and 17 years old. They identified 88,665 emergency department visits. Of these, 20.9% were admitted to hospitals due to depression.
“There was a striking 76% increase in long-term boarding,” the researchers noted. While 26.1% were female, only 15.9% of the patients admitted were male. On average, they spent nine nights in the hospital. “Only 14% of pediatric hospital physicians reported that youth residing in their facilities received medication management and 18% that they received psychotherapy. Parents of boarding youths often likened the environment to confinement and experienced great distress while boarding. Doctors often find it morally disturbing to care for retirement youth,” they added.
Overhage and colleagues also saw a 7% increase in the number of young people visiting emergency rooms due to poor mental health. But among teenage girls, that number skyrocketed to 22%. “Multiple factors are likely contributing to the increase in mental health problems in women, including more pandemic stress, more pandemic disruptions at school, and emotional abuse at home,” the researchers wrote in the JAMA study.
“This may explain why the increase in ED visits for women was mainly driven by suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and self-harm. There was also a doubling in the number of adolescent women with an ED visit for an eating disorder. This may be a continuation of a prepandemic trend of worsening eating disorder symptoms,” they added. “Some have hypothesized that the worsening of symptoms during the pandemic was due to more screen time and seeing themselves on camera. However, if this is the mechanism was, we would have expected a reduction in ED visits with a return to face-to-face learning, which we do not observe.
In a press release, the study’s lead author, Lindsay Overhage said: “A surprising and concerning finding was that the increase in emergency room visits was largely driven by girls coming to the hospital for conditions such as suicidal thoughts or plans, suicide attempts and self-harm. It is critical that we do everything we can to prevent these serious illnesses and treat those who suffer.”