Global increase in child mental health problems amid a pandemic

PARIS (AP) – When his parents rushed him to the hospital, eleven-year-old Pablo was barely eating and had stopped drinking altogether. Weakened by months of self-deprivation, his heart had slowed to a crawl and his kidneys faltered. Doctors injected him with fluids and fed him through a tube – the first steps to joining another child who broke up amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis.

For doctors treating them, the impact of the pandemic on children’s mental health is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital that serves Pablo has doubled the number of children and adolescents in need of treatment after the suicide attempt since September.

Doctors elsewhere report similar climbs, with children (some as young as eight) deliberately run over, with an overdose of pills and self-harm. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides reached record levels in 2020, according to the Ministry of Education.

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

They are also becoming more common, say doctors, children suffering from panic attacks, heart palpitations and other symptoms of mental distress, as well as chronic addictions to mobile devices and computer screens that have become the hallmarks. its seats, teachers and entertainers during closures, curfews and school closures.

“There is no prototype for the child who is having difficulty,” said Dr. Richard Delorme, who heads the psychiatric unit that treats Pablo at the giant pediatric hospital Robert Debré, the busiest in France. “That concerns us all.”

Paul’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually became ill with a chronic eating disorder as he caught the pandemic and starved to death slowly until the only foods he ate were small amounts of food. rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes.

Jerome suspects that interruptions to Pablo’s routines last year may have contributed to his illness. Because France was closed, the boy did not have classes at school for months and could not say goodbye to his friends and teachers at the end of the school year.

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

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

Islamic State extremists who killed 130 people in gun and bomb attacks through Paris in 2015, even in a cafe on the Paseo de Pablo to school, he also left a burning footprint in his childhood. Pablo used to believe that the dead customers of the cafe were buried under the sidewalk where he was stepping.

When he was hospitalized in late February, Pablo had lost a third of his previous weight. Her heart rate was so slow that doctors struggled to find a pulse and one of her kidneys failed, said her father, who agreed to talk about her son’s illness on condition they were not identified by his last name.

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

Pablo’s psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, says some of his young patients with eating disorders, mostly ages 8 to 12, told him they became obsessed with stopping to gain weight because they could not remain active. A boy was compensated by walking around his parents ’basement for hours every day, losing weight so hastily that he had to be hospitalized.

Others told him they were restricting their diet little by little: “There’s no more sugar, then there’s no more fat, and finally there’s nothing more,” he said.

Some children try to keep their mental anguish to themselves, unwilling to further burden the adults in their lives who may be grieving for loved ones or for jobs lost by the coronavirus. “They try to be forgotten kids, which doesn’t add to their parents’ problems, ”Stordeur said.

Children may also not have vocabulary about mental illness express their need for help and establish a connection between their difficulties and the pandemic.

“They don’t say,‘ Yes, I ended up here because of the coronavirus, ’” Delorme said. “But what they tell you is a chaotic world: ‘Yeah, I don’t do my activities anymore,’ ‘I don’t do my music anymore,’ ‘Going to school is hard in the mornings.’ I’m sick of the mask ‘”.

Dr David Greenhorn said the Bradford Royal Nursing Emergency Department, where he works in the north of England, treated one or two children a week for mental health emergencies, including suicide attempts. The average is now approaching one or two a day, sometimes involving children as young as eight, he said.

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

In Robert Debré, the psychiatric unit used to see about 20 suicide attempts a month involving children aged 15 and under. Not only has that number doubled in a few months since September, but some children also seem increasingly determined to end their lives, Delorme said.

“We are very surprised by the intensity of the desire to die among children who may be 12 or 13 years old,” he said. “Sometimes we have nine-year-olds who already want to die. And it’s not just a provocation or a blackmail for suicide. It is a genuine desire to end their lives. ”

“The stress levels among children are really massive,” he said. “The crisis is affecting us all, from 2 to 99 years old.”

—-

AP writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.

—-

Follow all AP pandemic coverage at:

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

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

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak