It’s no secret that kids in the U.S. are struggling with mental health issues in increasing numbers. Now, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association emphasizes the severity of the situation: Pediatric mental health hospitalizations are rising, and many more kids are being hospitalized for attempting suicide.
The data couldn’t be clearer: We’re not identifying and supporting struggling kids before they hit a crisis.
JoAnna Leyenaar of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, lead author of the study, noticed a growing proportion of the patients at her hospital were coming in because of mental health conditions. She decided to mine the country’s largest public database of pediatric inpatient care to try to understand if it was a nationwide trend.
And clearly, it is. Between 2009 and 2019, pediatric mental health hospitalizations at acute care facilities rose by nearly 26 percent. By 2019, two-thirds of those children and adolescents were coming into the hospital after having attempted suicide or harmed themselves.
A few important things came out of the data Leyenaar and her colleagues analyzed. First, because they chose to look at the 10-year period starting in 2009, the study makes clear that this rise can’t be blamed on the pandemic — kids were already in crisis before that upheaval.
Second, the increase in mental health hospitalizations is happening across the board, regardless of a child’s race, socioeconomic status or ZIP code. Certain groups are struggling more, though. Girls experienced a much sharper rise in hospitalizations than boys — which jibes with a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And kids in early adolescence — between the ages of 11 and 14 — experienced the biggest uptick in mental health crises.
The most obvious solution is to throw all of our resources into preventing these crises from happening. That means building the health care capacity to treat kids long before they’re at a point where a parent has nowhere else to turn but an ER or local hospital.
That’s not going to happen overnight. To address the needs of children and adolescents, the U.S. would need five times as many pediatric mental health specialists.
In the meantime, staff at acute-care facilities need more support. That includes training on how to best care for a child experiencing a serious mental health disorder. Most physicians in an acute care setting “are not trained mental health professionals, or have very minimal mental health training through medical school and residence,” Leyenaar notes.
And the U.S. simply needs more dedicated, high-quality mental health facilities for minors. The JAMA article pointed out that more kids are being admitted to acute care facilities at a time of shrinking resources.
Creating that capacity isn’t cheap. A patient room in an adolescent psychiatric unit, including special safety features, can run upward of $1 million. A single room.
Yet even if such rooms could be built for free, pediatric mental health would not be a profitable business. A child psychiatry unit within a general hospital typically isn’t financially sustainable, according to a 2022 report from the American Psychiatric Association, because care is expensive and reimbursement rates are low.
But we can’t let resources hold us back from helping struggling kids. They are in crisis — and they’re counting on adults to help.
Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry.
