Global increase in mental health issues in children amid 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-control, his heart slowed and his kidneys faltered. Medici injected him with fluids and passed him through a tube – first steps to stitch another child together amid the turmoil of the coronavirus crisis.

For doctors treating them, the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of children is increasingly worrying. The pediatric hospital in Paris, which is caring for Pablo, has seen an increase in the number of children and young teenagers needed since September after suicide attempts.

Doctors elsewhere report similar congestion, with children – some as young as 8 – deliberately getting into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise damaging themselves. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides have reached record levels according to the Ministry of Education in 2020.

Pediatric psychiatrists say they also see children with coronavirus-related phobias, tics and eating disorders, who are addicted to infection, scrub their hands raw, cover their bodies with disinfectant gel and are afraid of getting sick from food.

According to doctors, children are also more and more common experiencing panic attacks, palpitations and other symptoms of mental anxiety, as well as chronic addiction to mobile devices and computer screens that have become their sitters, teachers and entertainers during seating, curfews and school closing.

“There is no prototype for the child experiencing problems,” said Dr. Richard Delorme said, who heads the psychiatric unit that treats Pablo in the giant children’s hospital Robert Debré, the busiest in France. “It’s about all of us.”

Pablo’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually became ill with a chronic eating disorder as the pandemic took hold and slowly starved himself until the only food he would eat was small amounts of rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes. wash.

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

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

Sometimes there are other factors that pile up misery than 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 gun and bomb attacks across Paris in 2015, also at a cafe on Pablo’s walk to school, also left a saturated stamp on his childhood. Pablo had earlier believed that the cafe’s deceased customers were buried under the sidewalk where he stepped.

When he was admitted to the hospital in late February, Pablo lost a third of his previous weight. His heartbeat was so slow that medics struggled to find a pulse, and one of his kidneys failed, his father said, agreeing to talk about his son’s illness provided they were not identified by their surname. not.

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

Pablo’s psychiatrist in the hospital, dr. Coline Stordeur, says that some of her other young patients with eating disorders, mostly between 8 and 12 years old, told her that they had an obsession with gaining weight because they could not stay active. One boy compensated by running for hours in his parents’ basement every day and falling off so fast that he had to be admitted to the hospital.

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

Some children try to keep their mental anxiety to themselves, and do not want to burden the adults in their lives who may be mourning loved ones or work lost to the coronavirus even more. They ‘try to be children who are forgotten, who do not increase their parents’ problems’, Stordeur said.

Children also do not have the vocabulary of mental illness to express their need for help and to make a connection between their problems and the pandemic.

“They do not say, ‘Yes, I ended up here because of the coronavirus,'” Delorme said. ‘But what they’re telling you is a chaotic world:’ Yes, I do not do my activities anymore ‘,’ I do not do my music anymore ‘,’ to go to school in the morning, ” I struggle to wake up be, ” I’m fed up with the mask. ”

Dr David Greenhorn said the emergency department at Bradford Royal Infirmary, 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 closer to one or two a day, which sometimes involves children as young as eight, he said.

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

In the psychiatric unit, Robert Debré typically saw about 20 suicide attempts per month where children were 15 years and younger. Not only has the number doubled in some months since September, but it also appears that some children are increasingly determined to end their lives, Delorme said.

“We are very surprised at the intensity of the desire to die among children who are 12 or 13 years old,” he said. “Sometimes we have children aged 9 who already want to die. And it is not merely a provocation or an extortion by suicide. It is a sincere wish to end their lives. ”

“The tension between children is very great,” he said. “The crisis is affecting everyone from 2 to 99 years old.”

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AP author Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.

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