Hospitalizations and emergency room visits for suicide attempts and ideation increased nationally among children and adolescents from 2016 to 2021, a new study has found, the latest in a series of warning signs about the state of young people’s mental health.
According to the research, published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open, nearly 66 percent of the cases were girls, and the median age was 15. The study also revealed seasonal trends: ER visits and hospitalizations were 15% higher in April and 24% higher in October than the January rate, which the study used as a reference because it was close to average. annual. However, 2020 was an exception to both seasonal fluctuations and the increase in suicidality over time.
Taken together, the researchers said the findings indicate that the academic calendar may affect the mental health of young people.
«If you are a health care provider or public health official looking to invest money or interventions in school programs, targeting women, particularly during seasonal patterns, could be an effective way to reach people who are running higher risk». said Scott Lane, a professor of psychiatry at UTHealth Houston and a co-author of the study.
Other recent research has similarly shown an increase in mental health problems among young people, particularly adolescent girls. TO 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Survey found that nearly 57% of adolescent girls reported feeling «persistently sad or hopeless,» and 22% of adolescent girls said they had seriously considered dying by suicide. Even before the pandemic, the CDC reported that 1 in 5 adolescents had experienced an episode of major depression.
The new study did not look at deaths by suicide, which is the second cause of death among teens, according to the CDC. Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among people aged 10 to 24 increased by 57%although the rate is higher for most other age groups.
Instead, the new research focused on a pool of more than 73,000 emergency room visits and hospitalizations for suicidal ideation or suicide attempts among children and teens enrolled in commercial health insurance plans and Medicare Advantage. The participants were between the ages of 10 and 18, and the results showed that between 2016 and 2021, these hospital visits increased from 760 out of 100,000 people studied to 1,160. However, the 2020 number was down to 942.
That drop may be because people were hesitant to visit hospitals due to Covid risks, Lane said.
Another possible explanation could be that during the lockdown, some teachers were more lenient with school work, students slept more and some teens had less anxiety about being excluded from social gatherings, according to Jonathan Singer, a professor of social work at the University of Loyola of Chicago and former president of the American Association of Suicidology, who was not involved in the investigation.
“Many adults forget that children spend all day going from one place to another, from one topic to another, surrounded by people they didn’t choose to be with, who ask them to do things they never chose to do,” Singer said. . «I think there’s a stressor related to that that we often dismiss.»
Lane said the jump in 2021 was bigger than his team would have anticipated.
“The negative mental health effects of the Covid period – we may have just discovered the post-Covid ones, when there was a return to school,” he said.
He seasonal increase in suicidal thoughts and attempts What their study found, Lane added, is a well-researched trend between age groups, often attributed to seasonal changes in temperature and climate.
But kids and teens in particular, Singer said, are more likely to feel upbeat during the start of the school year, then see their mental health take a hit in mid-fall. In many cases, she added, students are also being monitored more closely for behavioral problems related to mental health at school. Also, the fall and spring months may coincide with placement tests or standardized tests, Singer said.
“Now that we know there is some national data to suggest that hospitalizations increase during the fall and spring, we need to think about doing a suicide prevention program right at the beginning of the school year, but also think about doing it proactively when kids they are smaller,” Singer said.
Regina Miranda, a professor of psychology at Hunter College who was not involved in the study, said sending teens with mental health problems to hospitals or medical centers is often a poor solution to the problem. Instead, she said, more must be done to reduce the stigma around depression and suicide and to improve access to mental health counseling and support.
“When a child says that they are thinking about committing suicide, sometimes the tendency is to raise that child’s risk level because people are worried,” Miranda said. «But automatically taking the child to the hospital, to the emergency room, for some children that might be helpful, but not for many children, that’s not the necessary next step.»
Miranda also pointed to a gap in the study: The data set did not include patients who were uninsured or covered by Medicaid, a group likely come from marginalized backgrounds.
Overall, Miranda said, a change is needed in the conversations that school administrators, counselors and parents have with young people about their mental health.
“We need to start thinking about it not in an alarmist way, but in a way that encourages kids to feel comfortable disclosing to people that they are thinking about committing suicide, where we can normalize mental health conversations in school without trying to the people. that they are struggling with their symptoms as if something is wrong with them,” Miranda said.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741, or visit TalkingSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.