Suicidal crises, mental fatigue: Kids struggle after pandemic isolation

After two suicidal crises during pandemic isolation, 16-year-old Zach Sampson feels stronger but fears his social skills are stale.

Amara Bhatia has overcome her pandemic depression, but the teenager feels exhausted, in a state of “neutrality”. Virginia Shipp adapts but says the return to normal “is kind of abnormal to me”.

After relentless months of social distancing, online training, and other restrictions, many children are feeling the toll of the pandemic or facing new re-entry challenges.

A surge in teen suicide attempts and other mental health crises led Children’s Hospital Colorado to declare a state of emergency in late May when the hospital emergency room and inpatient beds were overcrowded with suicidal children and other psychiatric issues. Typical emergency room waiting times for psychiatric treatment doubled to about 20 hours in May, said Jason Williams, a child psychologist at the Aurora hospital.

Other children’s hospitals face similar challenges.

In typical times, the activities that occur at the end of the school year – graduation, prom, graduation, summer job hunting – can be stressful for even the most resilient of children. But after more than a year of dealing with pandemic restrictions, many are worn out and simply don’t have “enough in the tank of resilience” to deal with pressures that would previously have been manageable, Williams said.

“When the pandemic first broke out, we saw a spike in severe cases in crisis ratings,” as children struggled with “shutting down their whole world,” said Christine Certain, a mental health advisor who works with Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children from Orlando Health. “Now that we are seeing the world open again … it is again asking these children to make a big change.”

In some children’s hospitals, psychiatric cases have remained high throughout the pandemic; others have seen a recent surge.

At Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., Behavioral department admissions for children ages 13 and younger have skyrocketed since 2020 and are projected to reach 230 this year, more than four times more than in 2019, hospital psychologist Terrie said Andrews. In older teenagers, admissions were up to five times higher than usual in the past year and remained elevated through the last month.

At Ohio’s Dayton Children’s Hospital, admissions to the mental health department rose 30% to nearly 1,300 from July 2020 through May. The hospital doubled the number of beds available to 24 and lowered the minimum age for treatment from 12 to 9 years, said Dr. John Duby, a vice president of the hospital.

“The overwhelming demand for child mental health services is putting an unprecedented burden on pediatric facilities, primary care, schools, and community-based organizations that support child welfare,” said Amy Knight, president of the Children’s Hospital Association.

Dr. Alison Tothy, medical director of the pediatric emergency room at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital, said her emergency room had seen children in crisis every day since last year struggling with thoughts of suicide, cuts and other self-harming behaviors, depression and aggression outbreaks. The children are stabilized and transferred to another location for treatment.

“Families come to us because in some cases we are the last resort. Outpatient resources are scarce,” she says, and parents say they have not been given an appointment for two months.

In Florida, waiting times for outpatient treatment are even longer and many therapists don’t accept children with Medicaid coverage, Andrews said.

At Children’s Hospital Colorado, emergency room visits for behavioral health issues increased 90% in April 2021 compared to April 2019 and remained high in May. Although the pace slowed in June, hospital authorities are concerned about a further spike when school resumes.

Williams said the problems the hospital is addressing are “across the board,” from children with previous mental health problems who have worsened to those who had never faced them before the pandemic.

As in many states, Colorado doesn’t have enough child and teen psychotherapists to meet demand, a problem even before the pandemic, Williams said.

It takes six to nine months for an appointment to be made for children in need of outpatient treatment. And many therapists don’t accept health insurance, leaving families in trouble with few options. Delays in treatment can lead to crises that bring children to the emergency room.

Those who are better off after inpatient mental health care but aren’t doing well enough to go home are being sent out of the state because there aren’t enough facilities in Colorado, Williams said.

Sampson says “just a lot of stuff” sparked its first crisis last August. The Jacksonville, Florida teenager struggled with online education and spent hours alone in his room playing video games and scrolling the Internet, drawn to dark sites that “hurt my brain.”

He revealed his suicidal thoughts to a friend who called the police. He spent a week in the hospital under psychiatric treatment.

His parents both worked in psychiatry but had no idea how he was struggling with it.

“We had noticed that he had spent more time isolating himself, not really prone to showering and the like, but we were in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody really did these things, ”said his mother, Jennifer Sampson.

The teenager started on virtual psychotherapy, but in March his self-destructive thoughts resurfaced. The hospital’s psychiatric beds were full, so he waited in a waiting area for a week to receive treatment, his mother recalled.

Now on Mood Stabilizers, he is continuing his therapist visits, has finished his sophomore year and is looking forward to returning to personal school this fall. Even so, he says it’s hard to motivate yourself to leave the house to go to the gym or hang out with friends.

“I definitely think my social skills are rusty,” said Sampson.

“I have a feeling this is going to be something we will be looking at for quite a while,” said his mother.

This probably also applies to those who have not yet reached a crisis point.

Bhatia, a 17-year-old self-described “stereotypical introvert” with clinical anxiety, is also concerned about returning to the classroom for senior year.

The Oakland, Calif. Teenager says the pandemic started as an almost welcome relief. Being social takes effort, and isolation allowed her to recharge. Even so, she was depressed, frustrated with virtual school, and missed her friends.

She used to be a hugger, but has turned “a little more of a germaphobia”, saying that the few times she’s been hugged since social distancing restrictions were lifted, she froze.

The pandemic left them exhausted, “like running a marathon, and I’m finally finished and just getting so tired at this point.”

“I think I don’t have the energy to be happy,” she said.

For 18-year-old Shipp, also from Oakland, the pandemic hit her senior year as she planned a trip to Europe and expected college in the fall. Neither happened, and she described 2020 as a year of negative thinking stuck in her room with just her thoughts.

“I felt depressed and anxious and was very afraid of the future,” she said.

As a black woman, she wanted to join protesters protesting the murder of George Floyd, but decided that close contact with strangers was too risky.

She doesn’t know anyone who got very sick or died, but she says she worries about COVID-19 “every day”. Shipp used meditation to reduce stress.

She recently got vaccinated and was studying to college at Cal Poly in Pomona, will be in person in the fall. But she’s not sure if she’s quite ready.

“It’s still a bit weird because now all of a sudden… you don’t have to wear the mask? It’s like jumping into the water too fast, ”Shipp said. “Normality is somehow abnormal for me.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/suicidal-crises-mental-fatigue-kids-struggle-after-pandemic-isolation/