Worldwide increase in childhood mental health problems in the midst of a pandemic

PARIS (AP) – By the time his parents rushed him to the hospital, 11-year-old Pablo was barely eating and had stopped drinking altogether. Weakened by months of self-deprivation, his heart had slowed and his kidneys started to falter. Medics injected him with fluid and fed him through a tube – the first steps to sew together another child who fell apart amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis.

For doctors treating them, the impact of the pandemic on children’s mental health is of increasing concern. The children’s hospital in Paris that cares for Pablo has seen a doubling since September in the number of children and young teens needing treatment after a suicide attempt.

Doctors elsewhere report similar spikes, with children – some as young as 8 years old – deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills, and otherwise causing self-harm. In Japan, suicides among children and adolescents reached record levels in 2020, according to the Ministry of Education.

Child psychiatrists say they also see children with coronavirus-related phobias, tics and eating disorders, obsessed with infection, scrubbing their hands raw, covering their bodies with disinfectant gel, and terrified of getting sick from food.

Also increasingly common, doctors say, are children suffering from panic attacks, heart palpitations and other symptoms of mental anxiety, as well as chronic addictions to mobile devices and computer screens that have become their sitters, teachers and entertainers during lockdowns, curfews and school closures.

“There is no prototype for the troubled child,” said Dr. Richard Delorme, head of the psychiatric ward treating Pablo at the gigantic Robert Debré Children’s Hospital, France’s busiest children’s hospital. “This concerns us all.”

Pablo’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually fell ill with a chronic eating disorder when the pandemic hit and slowly starved himself until the only foods he would eat were small amounts of rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes.

Jerome suspects disruptions to Pablo’s routines may have contributed to his illness last year. Because France was locked up, the boy had no classes at school for months and could not say goodbye to his friends and teacher at the end of the school year.

“It was very tough,” said Jerome. “This is a generation that has been beaten.”

Sometimes other factors pile up on misery beyond the burden of the 2.6 million COVID-19 victims who died in the world’s worst health crisis in a century.

Islamic State extremists who killed 130 people in firearms and bombings Paris in 2015, including in a café on Pablo’s walk to school, also left a scorching mark on his youth. Pablo always thought that the cafe’s dead customers were buried under the sidewalk where he walked.

When he was hospitalized in late February, Pablo had lost a third of his previous weight. His heart rate was so slow that doctors had trouble finding a heartbeat, and one of his kidneys was failing, said his father, who agreed to talk about his son’s illness, provided they couldn’t use their last name. be identified.

“It is a real nightmare to have a child who destroys himself,” said the father.

Pablo’s psychiatrist in the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, says some of her other young patients with eating disorders, usually between the ages of 8 and 12, told her that they were starting to force weight into lockdown because they couldn’t stay active. One boy made up for this by running around for hours in his parents’ basement every day, losing so quickly that he had to be hospitalized.

Others told her that they were gradually limiting their diet: “No more sugar, then no more fat, and eventually nothing more,” she said.

Some kids try to keep their mental anguish to themselves and don’t want to further burden the adults in their lives who may be mourning loved ones or jobs lost by the coronavirus. They “try to be children who are forgotten, who do not contribute to their parents’ problems,” said Stordeur.

Children can also lack vocabulary of mental illness to express their need for help and link their difficulties to the pandemic.

“They don’t say, ‘Yes, I ended up here because of the coronavirus,’” said Delorme. “But what they tell you about is a chaotic world, from ‘Yes, I don’t do my activities anymore’, ‘I don’t do my music anymore’, ‘Going to school is difficult in the morning’, I have trouble waking up to become, “ I’m tired of the mask. ”

Dr. David Greenhorn said the Bradford Royal Infirmary’s emergency department, where he works in Northern England, used to treat one or two children a week for mental health emergencies, including suicide attempts. The average is now closer to one or two a day, sometimes with children as young as 8 years old, he said.

“This is an international epidemic, and we don’t recognize it,” Greenhorn said in a telephone interview. “In the life of an 8-year-old, a year is really, really long. They are fed up. They cannot see an end to it. ”

In Robert Debré, the psychiatric ward usually saw about 20 suicide attempts per month involving children 15 and younger. Not only has that number doubled in a few months since September, but some kids also seem increasingly determined to end their lives, Delorme said.

“We are very surprised by the intensity of the desire to die among children 12 or 13 years old,” he said. “We sometimes have 9-year-old children who already want to die. And it’s not just provocation or blackmail via suicide. It is a sincere wish to end their lives. ”

“The stress levels in children are really enormous,” he said. “The crisis affects us all, from 2 to 99 years old.”

AP writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.

Follow AP’s full pandemic coverage on:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak