The global growth of childhood mental health problems amid the pandemic

PARIS (AP) – When his parents took him to the hospital, 11-year-old Pablo barely ate and stopped drinking altogether. Weak from a few months of lack of self-esteem, his heart slowed until he crawled, and his kidneys swayed. Doctors injected him with fluids and fed him through a tube – the first steps towards 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. Pablo’s pediatric hospital in Paris has seen a doubling of the number of children and young people in need of treatment after suicide attempts in September.

Doctors elsewhere report similar increases, and children – some up to the age of 8 – deliberately face trafficking, pill overdose and otherwise injure themselves. In Japan, suicides of children and adolescents have reached record levels in 2020, according to the Ministry of Education.

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

Also becoming more 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 jobs. and animators during blockades, children and school closures.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes other factors pile up on the mess 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 gun and bomb attacks throughout Paris in 2015, including at a cafe on Pablo’s walk to school, he also left a hot imprint in his childhood. Pablo used to think that the dead customers of the cafe were buried under the sidewalk where he was stepping.

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

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

Pablo’s psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, says that some of her other young patients with eating disorders, mostly between the ages of 8 and 12, told her that they have become obsessed with blockade. to gain weight because they could not remain active. A boy was compensated in turns in his parents’ basement for hours every day, losing so much weight that he had to be hospitalized.

Others told her that they were gradually restricting their diet: “There is no more sugar, then no more fat, and finally we have nothing,” she said.

Some children try to keep their mental anguish to themselves, not wanting to continue to burden the adults in their lives who are probably mourning their loved ones or the jobs lost by the coronavirus. They “try to be children forgotten by them, which does not add to their parents’ problems,” Stordeur said.

Children may also lack the vocabulary of mental illness to express their need for help and to make a connection between their difficulties and the pandemic.

“I’m not saying, ‘Yes, I got here because of the coronavirus,'” Delorme said. But what I’m telling you about them is about a chaotic world: “Yes, I don’t do my activities anymore”, “I don’t do my music anymore”, “Going to school is hard in the morning”. I have difficulty waking up, “I’m tired of the mask.” ”

Dr David Greenhorn said the emergency department at the Royal Bradford Infirmary, where he works in the north of 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 involving children up to 8 years old, he said.

“This is an international epidemic and we do not recognize it,” Greenhorn said in a telephone interview. “In the life of an 8-year-old child, a year is a very, very, very long time. I’m tired. I can’t see an end. ”

At Robert Debré, the psychiatric unit used to see about 20 suicide attempts a month involving children aged 15 and under. Not only has this number doubled in the past 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 can be 12 or 13 years old,” he said. “Sometimes we have 9-year-olds who already want to die. And it’s not just a provocation or a blackmail by 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 the age of 2 to 99.”

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AP writer Mari Yamaguchi from Tokyo contributed.

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