The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the mental health of teenagers and young adults – with self-harm and overdose skyrocketing, especially between 13 and 18 years of age, according to a new worrying national study of medical records and insurance claims.
FAIR Health, a non-profit organization that collects data for the largest private health insurance claims database in the United States, analyzed 32 billion records and studied those in the 13 to 18 and 19 to 22 age groups. .
The organization followed the month-to-month changes from January to November 2020, compared to the same period last year.
In March and April 2020, the total number of mental health claims for young people aged 13 to 18, as a percentage of all medical claim lines, approximately doubled compared to the two months of 2019, according to the study.
Complaints for overdoses specifically in this age group jumped to 94.91 percent of all medical complaints in March 2020 and 119.31 percent in April 2020, compared to the same period last year.
The complaint lines for substance use disorders also increased as a percentage of all complaints in March (64.64%) and April (62.69%) in 2020, compared to the corresponding months in 2019.
Also in the 13 to 18 age group, in April 2020, the major depressive disorder order lines increased by 83.9% and the generalized anxiety disorder order lines increased by 93.6%, according to the study.
In general, the 19-22 group had similar mental health trends, but less pronounced than the younger group.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on mental health, particularly among young people,” said FAIR Health President Robin Gelburd in a statement.
“The findings in our new report have implications for all youth caregivers, including providers, parents, educators, legislators and payers,” she added.
Those seeking help with mental health increased during that time, despite the decline in other medical claims, noted Gelburd.
“We clearly see a reduction in people’s access to medical care, especially in March and April, but we see continued use of mental health services during that time,” she told MedPage Today:
“The need for mental health services persisted and, in a way, increased during that period.”
His team also found that the gender disparities in mental health services that existed before the pandemic increased.
Although girls accounted for two-thirds of the claims queues before the outbreak, the percentage of claims attributed to women increased from March, reaching 71% in November 2020.
“These results are generally consistent with the findings of other researchers that women are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with mental illness as men,” said the report.
The study also showed a large increase in intentional self-harm claims as a percentage of all medical claims, increasing 91 percent in March and nearly doubling in April 2020 compared to 2019, MedPage Today reported.
Women were up to five times more likely than men to be treated for intentional self-harm, the researchers found.
Comparing August 2019 with August 2020 in the Northeast, for the group 13-18, there was an increase of 333.93% in the claims of intentional self-mutilation, a higher rate than in any other region in any month studied for the group.
Dr. Jess Shatkin, of the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, said that while the data is not surprising, they “talk about something that concerns us”.
“We know that teenagers already have high rates of mental illness,” Shatkin told MedPage Today. “Now [with the pandemic], your parents are starting to struggle, with relationships, jobs, food security. This only raises the stakes. We already see vulnerability and that only makes them more vulnerable. “
FAIR Health’s new white paper, seventh in its COVID-19 studies, is entitled “The Impact of COVID-19 on Pediatric Mental Health: A Study of Private Healthcare Claims”.