The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on teens and young adults – with self-harm and overdose claims skyrocketing, especially among 13- to 18-year-olds, according to a disturbing new national study of medical records and insurance. claims.
FAIR Health, a nonprofit that collects data for the largest database of privately billed health insurance claims in the U.S., looked at 32 billion records and studied those in the 13-18 and 19-22 ages.
The organization tracked month-to-month changes from January to November 2020, compared to the same period of the year before.
In March and April 2020, total mental health claims for young people aged 13 to 18, as a percentage of all medical claim rules, roughly doubled compared to the two months in 2019, the study said.
Overdose claims, specifically in that age group, rose to 94.91 percent of all medical claims in March 2020 and 119.31 percent in April 2020, compared to the same period a year earlier.
Claim rules for substance use disorders also increased as a percentage of all claims in March (64.64 percent) and April (62.69 percent) 2020, compared to the corresponding months in 2019.
Also in the age group 13-18 years, in April 2020, the claims rules for major depressive disorder increased by 83.9 percent and the claims rules for generalized anxiety disorder increased by 93.6 percent, the study said.
Overall, the 19-22 group showed mental health trends that were similar to, but less pronounced than, the younger group.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on mental health, especially that of young people,” FAIR Health Chairman Robin Gelburd said in a statement.
“The findings in our new report have implications for all those responsible for youth care, including caregivers, parents, educators, policymakers and payers,” she added.
Those seeking help with mental health rose during that time, despite other medical claims declining, Gelburd noted.
“We are clearly seeing a decline in the number of people accessing medical care, especially in March and April, but we are seeing continued use of mental health services over that period,” she told MedPage Today:
“The need for mental health services persisted during that period and increased in some ways.”
Her team also found that gender inequalities in mental health care that existed before the pandemic were widening.
While girls accounted for two-thirds of the pre-outbreak claim lines, the percentage of claims attributed to women increased from March, reaching 71 percent in November 2020.
“These results are generally consistent with the findings of other researchers that women are nearly twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with mental illness,” the report said.
The research also showed a significant increase in intentional self-harm claims as a percentage of all medical claims, up 91 percent in March and nearly doubling in April 2020 compared to 2019, MedPage Today reported.
Females were up to five times more likely than males to be treated for deliberate self-harm, the researchers found.
Compared to August 2019 with August 2020 in the Northeast, for the 13-18 group there was a 333.93 percent increase in intentional self-harm claims, a rate higher than that in any other region in any month for the group was studied.
Dr. Jess Shatkin of the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center said that while the data is not surprising, it is “talking about something we were all concerned about.”
“We know that teens already have high rates of mental illness,” Shatkin told MedPage Today. “Now [with the pandemic], their parents begin to struggle with relationships, jobs, food security. It just ups the ante. We already see vulnerability and this only makes them more vulnerable. “
FAIR Health’s new white paper, the seventh in its COVID-19 studies, is entitled “The Impact of COVID-19 on Pediatric Mental Health: A Study of Private Healthcare Claims.”