New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Experts say pandemic-related mental health issues among youth a long-term problem
The number of young people dealing with mental health issues has been increasing for at least a decade, and the pandemic has made it worse, experts say.
Melissa Santos, the senior pediatric psychologist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, said while the mental health crisis came to light for many during the pandemic, it had already existed for
teens and adolescents.
“COVID put a spotlight on it and amplified it,” Santos said. “We have seen an increase, but it wasn’t good before the pandemic, and we were definitely struggling before the pandemic with a large number of kids needing services and a large number of kids not being able to access services. But COVID definitely put a spotlight on it.”
Statistics show an uptick in mental health problems among youth for more than a decade.
More than one in three high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2019, a 40 percent increase since 2009. Also in 2019, about one in six youth reported making a suicide plan in the past year, a 44 percent increase in 10 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
From 2010 to 2020, suicide
was the second leading cause of death for Connecticut residents ages 15 to 24 and the third leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 14, the CDC reports.
The annual average of Connecticut children ages 12 to 17 who experienced major depressive episodes increased to 13.9 percent during 2016 to 2019, compared to 8.9 percent in 2004 to 2007, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,
Experts attribute the rise in youth mental health struggles to a number of things, though there is general agreement that the COVID-19 pandemic made the situation worse.
“Objective data is showing rates of anxiety disorders, rates of mood disorders are increasing,” said Margaret McClure, the chairwoman of Fairfield University’s psychology department. “The number of visits to emergency rooms for suicidal (thoughts), suicide attempts, non-suicidal self-injury are all increasing.”
“A LOT OF PRESSURE ON YOUNG PEOPLE”
Christopher Burke, the executive director for Newport Healthcare Connecticut, said the pre-existing youth mental health crisis was exacerbated by the pandemic, with its stay-home orders and online schooling.
“The uptick preceded the pandemic, but the reasons are not definitive,” he said.
He believed the enormous amounts of technology teens are consuming are also having an effect.
“This tech use comes at the expense of in-person interpersonal relationships with friends and family, something that was also amplified by isolating stay-home orders during the pandemic,” he said.
Burke said the increased use of technology also means that teens are immersed in a too-fast-paced media culture.
“(This) can leave some young minds feeling helpless, again, magnified with the inherent fears of a global crisis like the pandemic,” he said. “Kids were getting constant news, sometimes factual, sometimes not, that was rather alarming at the start of COVID. This can certainly affect their mental health, creating anxiety and depression in previously unaffected kids.”
McClure said even professionals can not fully understand and account for all the reasons the mental health issues among youth are on the rise, but growing up with technology is one of them. While there are positives to that, she said, there is a lot more pressure on young people when they have to compare themselves to everyone on the internet.
“You’re not even comparing yourself to real, live people that you see in your history class,” she said. “You’re comparing yourself to these online, carefully constructed personas. That’s a lot of pressure on young people.”
Middle and high school aged children are where experts are really seeing the increase, McClure said, adding it is a part of development where they are trying to find themselves and their place. She said this generation is also growing up in a time where, because of mass shootings, even schools are not a place where they feel safe.
McClure said students experiencing these issues can have a hard time focusing or getting motivated to do school work. While there is no single factor that contributes to the rise, young people have grown up in a world where they deal with myriad issues, from school shootings to hate crimes to access to 24/7 media and all that comes with it, said Nance Roy, a
clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the chief clinical office of The Jed Foundation, a national nonprofit that aims to protect emotional health and prevents suicide.
“There’s so many environmental factors that our young people are growing up with and living in a world that, frankly, doesn’t feel safe,” she said. “I sometimes think I’d be more worried if we weren’t seeing kids being anxious. There’s good cause to be anxious. We’re not in a good place and this is the fallout.”
She said there’s been a continual rising trend on mental issues for at least the past decade, adding suicide rates increased every year for people 10 to 24 years old since 2007.
Roy said there has been a notable increase in the lower end of that age range ending up in the emergency room with acute mental health issues.
“I’m not sure that they are at the biggest risk, but they certainly are a growing number,” she said.
PANDEMIC LEADS TO MORE ISSUES FOR YOUTH
Santos said there has been a significant rise in demand for mental health services at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
“One of the things that COVID has shown us as well, is we are all trying to manage our mental health. Even if you don’t get diagnosed with a mental health condition I think we are all, or a majority of people, are dealing with types of stress, symptoms of anxiety or symptoms of sadness,” she said.
Studies about youth mental health coming out from the pandemic, such as one by The Journal of the American Medical Association, are showing depression and anxiety issues have doubled over the pandemic, said
Franc Hudspeth, the chair of Sacred Heart University’s counselor education program.
“We went from a place where 10 or 11 percent (of young people said they had those issues) to 20, 25 percent,” he said. “That goes along with suicidal ideations. There’s data that supports that as well.”
Hudspeth said there are large increases in suicide attempts and trips to emergency rooms for mental health related issues during the pandemic.
“We really begin to see this dramatic increase as the first shutdown happened,” he said. “It seems to be this dramatic increase is more connected to all the things that have happened in the last two, two-and-a-half years during the pandemic.”