Teen mental health crisis was getting worse even before the COVID pandemic

A few important things came out of the data Leyenaar and her colleagues analyzed. First, because they chose to look at the 10-year period starting in 2009, the study makes clear that this rise in more serious mental health conditions can’t be blamed on the pandemic — kids were already in crisis before that upheaval.

Second, the increase in mental health hospitalisations is happening across the board, regardless of a child’s race, socioeconomic status, or zip code. Certain groups are struggling more, though. Girls experienced a much sharper rise in hospitalisations than boys — which jibes with a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found a spike in teen girls feeling depressed and considering suicide. And kids in early adolescence — that is those between the ages of 11 and 14 — experienced the biggest uptick in mental health crises.

For mental-health workers, these new data confirm the scope of the problem. “This is going to be one we’re going to be quoting for a long time,” Cicchetti says. “This is a massive database across the whole country. It's highlighting that we have a real need to do something about it.”

The question, of course, is what can be done.

The most obvious solution is to throw all of our resources into preventing these crises from happening. That means building the healthcare capacity to treat kids long before they’re at a point where a parent has nowhere else to turn but an ER or local hospital.

That’s not going to happen overnight. To address the needs of children and adolescents, the US would need five times as many pediatric mental health specialists. Building out a sufficient network will require not only increasing the number of psychiatrists and social workers, but doing a better job training the people who interact with kids most: pediatricians, teachers and community leaders.

In the meantime, staff at acute-care facilities need more support. That includes training on how to best care for a child experiencing a serious mental health disorder. Most physicians in an acute care setting “are not trained mental health professionals, or have very minimal mental health training through medical school and residence,” Leyenaar notes.

And the US simply needs more dedicated, high-quality mental health facilities for minors. The JAMA article pointed out that more kids are being admitted to acute care facilities at a time of shrinking resources.

Creating that capacity isn’t cheap. A recent article by WBEZ noted that outfitting a patient room in an adolescent psychiatric unit, an endeavor that involves special safety features, can run upward of $1 million. A single room.

Yet even if such rooms could be built for free, pediatric mental health would not be a profitable business. A child psychiatry unit housed within a general hospital typically isn’t financially sustainable, according to a 2022 report from the American Psychiatric Association, because care is expensive and reimbursement rates are low.

But we can’t let resources hold us back from helping struggling kids. They are in crisis — and they’re counting on adults to help.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg