Schools and other community-based resources must have the resources to provide professional counseling and other support.
Not every troubled young person will need in-patient care. But for children who need intensive care, additional federal and state funding for psychiatric beds in hospitals, clinics and other facilities is needed.įorty-eight of 50 states have a severe shortage of beds for teens and children who need in-patient psychiatric care, Belmonte said. There is no magic bullet to solve the problem, of course. Throw in a global pandemic, Belmonte said, and a bad situation gets even worse. Mental health problems among young people were already worsening before COVID-19, for a host of reasons including the negative influences of social media. “We’ve never seen numbers this high,” he said. At Advocate Children’s Hospital, during the first six months of 2021, the second most common diagnoses on medical wards involved behavioral health issues, Belmonte reports. is, quite honestly, about two years behind what we typically see,” a teacher from Elgin told WBEZ in October.īut the crisis goes far beyond school misbehavior. “The emotional-social readiness that our kids have right now. And this fall, teachers in suburban Chicago have indeed reported an uptick in students acting out since returning to the classroom. Teachers warned that students would need much more support to deal with the trauma when in-person schooling resumed. More than 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary or secondary caregiver to COVID-19, the coalition of experts reported. Many young people lost parents and other loved ones. Classmates, favorite teachers, sports, extracurricular activities - all those things that are paramount in their lives and contribute to mental well-being - were gone. They spent an entire school year, for the most part, attending school on electronic screens. That young people are struggling mightily to recover from the anxiety, isolation and fears caused by the pandemic should surprise no one. It’s up to every adult who can make a difference to pay attention and contribute, even in small ways, to solutions. “We already had a paucity of mental health services. Frank Belmonte, a primary care pediatrician and chief medical officer at Advocate Children’s Hospital. “Every day, kids are sitting in emergency rooms, on medical units awaiting psychiatric placement,” said Dr. Here in Chicago, as one expert told us recently, health care providers are overwhelmed. Soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts have been reported among children and teens nationwide, the organizations reported in a joint statement in October. The problem is especially acute among children and adolescents of color, whose communities have been hardest hit by COVID-19.īut young people across every social and economic class, and among all races and ethnic groups, are affected. The crisis is now a national emergency, a coalition of three major children’s health organizations warned recently: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association.