PARIS (AP) – When his parents rushed him to the hospital, Pablo, 11, barely ate and had stopped drinking altogether. Weakened by months of self-deprivation, his heart had slowed and his kidneys were faltering. Doctors injected him with fluids and fed him through a tube – the first steps to sew another child falling apart amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis.
For the doctors who treat them, the impact of the pandemic on children’s mental health is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital that cares for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of children and adolescents who need treatment after suicide attempts since September.
Doctors elsewhere report similar outbreaks, with children – some as young as 8 – deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and causing self-harm. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides reached record levels in 2020, according to the Ministry of Education.
Pediatric psychiatrists say they are also seeing children with coronavirus-related phobias, tics and eating disorders, obsessed with infections, rubbing their hands raw, covering their bodies with disinfectant gel and afraid of getting sick from food.
They are also increasingly common, say doctors, children who suffer from panic attacks, heart palpitations and other symptoms of mental distress, as well as chronic addictions to mobile devices and computer screens that became their nannies, teachers and artists during blockades, curfews and school closings.
“There is no prototype for the child with difficulties,” said Dr. Richard Delorme, who heads the psychiatric unit that treats Pablo at the gigantic pediatric hospital Robert Debré, the busiest in France. “It concerns us all.”
Pablo’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually fell ill with a chronic eating disorder as the pandemic set in, slowly starving until the only foods he would eat were small amounts of rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes.
Jerome suspects that interruptions in Pablo’s routine last year may have contributed to his illness. As France was closed, the boy was without classes at school for months and could not say goodbye to his friends and teacher at the end of the school year.
“It was very difficult,” said Jerome. “This is a generation that got beaten up.”
Sometimes, other factors accumulate in misery, in addition to 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 bomb and gun attacks in Paris in 2015, including at a cafe on Pablo’s walk to school, also left a lasting mark on his childhood. Pablo used to believe that dead coffee customers were buried under the sidewalk where he stepped.
When he was hospitalized in late February, Pablo had lost a third of his previous weight. His heartbeat was so slow that doctors struggled to find a pulse, and one of his kidneys was failing, said his father, who agreed to talk about his son’s illness on condition that they were not identified by his last name.
“It is a real nightmare to have a child that is destroying itself,” said the father.
Pablo’s psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, said that some of his other young patients with eating disorders, most of them aged 8 to 12, said they started obsessing about the blockade to gain weight because they couldn’t stay active. A boy made up for running in his parents’ basement for hours each day, losing weight so precipitously that he had to be hospitalized.
Others told her that they gradually restricted their diet: “No sugar, no fat and, eventually, nothing more,” she said.
Some children try to keep their mental distress to themselves, not wanting to further burden the adults in their lives who may be in mourning for loved ones or jobs lost to the coronavirus. They “try to be children who are forgotten, who don’t add to their parents’ problems,” said Stordeur.
Children may also lack the vocabulary of mental illness to express their need for help and make a connection between their difficulties and the pandemic.
“They don’t say, ‘Yes, I ended up here because of the coronavirus,'” said Delorme. “But what they talk about is a chaotic world, of ‘Yes, I’m not doing my activities anymore,’ ‘I’m not doing my music anymore’, ‘Going to school is difficult in the morning’, ‘I’m having trouble waking up ‘,’ I’m sick of the mask. ‘”
Dr. David Greenhorn said the emergency department at Bradford Royal Infirmary, where he works, in northern England, used to treat one or two children a week for mental health emergencies, including suicide attempts. The average is now close to one or two a day, sometimes involving 8-year-olds, he said.
“This is an international epidemic and we are not recognizing it,” said Greenhorn in a telephone interview. “In the life of an 8-year-old child, a year is a long, long, long time. They are fed up. They can’t seem to see an end to this. “
In Robert Debré, the psychiatric unit used to deal with about 20 cases of suicide attempt per month involving children aged 15 and under. Not only has that number doubled in a 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,” he said. “Sometimes we have children of 9 who already want to die. And it is not simply suicide provocation or blackmail. It is a genuine desire to end their lives. “
“The stress levels among children are really huge,” he said. “The crisis affects us all, from 2 to 99 years old.”
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AP editor Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.
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