When the pandemic first hit the Bay Area last spring, Ann
thought that her son, a 17-year-old senior, was finally on track to finish high
school. He had kicked a heavy marijuana habit and was studying in virtual
classes while school was closed.
اضافة اعلان
The first wave of stay-at-home orders shut down his usual
routines — sports, playing music with friends. But the stability did not last.
“The social isolation since then, over all this time, it just
got to him,” said Ann, a consultant living in suburban San Francisco. She, like
the other parents in this article, asked that her last name be omitted for
privacy and to protect her child. “This is a charming, funny kid, also
sensitive and anxious,” she said. “He couldn’t find a job; he couldn’t really
go out. And he started using marijuana again, and Xanax.”
The teenager’s frustration finally boiled over last month, when
he deliberately cut himself.
“We called 911, and he was taken to the emergency room,” his
mother said. “But there they just stitched him up and released him.” The
doctors sent him home, she said, “with no support, no therapy, nothing.”
Ann and her son are like many families over the last year.
Surveys and statistics show that for young people who are anxious by nature or
feeling emotionally fragile already, the pandemic and its isolation have pushed
them to the brink. Rates of suicidal thinking and behavior are up by 25 percent
or more from similar periods in 2019, according to a just-published analysis of
surveys of young patients coming into the emergency room.
For these teenagers, there are not many places to turn. They
need help, but it is hard to come up with a psychiatric diagnosis. They are
trying to manage a surprise interruption in their lives, a vague loss. And
without a diagnosis, reimbursement for therapy is hard to come by. And that is
assuming parents know what kind of help is appropriate and where to find it.
Finally, when a crisis hits, many of these teenagers end up in
the local emergency department — the one place desperate families so often go
for help.
Many ER departments across the country are now seeing a surge in
such cases. Through most of 2020, the proportion of pediatric emergency
admissions for mental problems, like panic and anxiety, was up by 24 percent
for young children and 31 percent for adolescents compared to the previous
year, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
And the local emergency department is frequently unprepared for
the added burden. Workers often are not specially trained to manage behavioral
problems, and families do not have many options for where to go next, leaving
many of these pandemic-insecure adolescents in limbo at the ER.
“This is a national crisis we’re facing,” Dr. Rebecca Baum, a
developmental pediatrician in Asheville, North Carolina. “Kids are having to
board in the ER for days on end because there are no psychiatric beds available
in their entire state, never mind the hospital. And of course, the child or
adolescent is lying there and doesn’t understand what’s happening in the ER,
why they’re having to wait there or where they’re going.”
What adolescents are feeling
Jean, an artist and mother of two living in Hendersonville,
North Carolina, said that her 17-year-old son was doing fine through last
spring. But the months of virtual classes and loss of simple social pleasures —
hanging out with friends, playing chess — changed him through the fall months.
“Now he’s become very reclusive. He has mood swings. He cries a
lot,” Jean said. “This giant boy, crying — it’s terrible to see.” The young man
has had panic attacks, twice followed by a blackout. During one, he fell and
injured his face.
Lisa, a mother of three in Asheville, said that the months of
virtual classes and relative social isolation had changed her extroverted
13-year-old son “in profound ways I would never have anticipated.”
His grades slipped badly, and he began to withdraw. “Next, he
was telling us he couldn’t make himself do the work, that he didn’t want to
disappoint us all the time, that he was worthless. Worthless.”
These young people do not necessarily qualify for a psychiatric
diagnosis, nor are they “traumatized” in the strict sense of having had a
life-threatening experience (or the perception of one). Rather, they are trying
to manage an interruption in their normal development, child psychologists say:
a sudden and indefinite suspension of almost every routine and social
connection, leaving a deep yet vague sense of loss with no single, distinct
source.
System overload
The resulting changes in behavior can seem sudden: A bright
sixth-grader is found cutting herself; a sweet-natured sophomore takes a swing
at a parent or sibling. Parents, frightened, often do not know where to go for
appropriate help. Many do not have the resources or knowledge to hire a
therapist.
Families that land in the emergency departments of their local
hospitals often find that the clinics are poorly equipped to handle these
incoming cases. The staff is better trained to manage physical trauma than the
mental variety, and patients are often sent right back home, without proper
evaluation or support. In severe cases, they may linger in the emergency
department for days before a bed can be found elsewhere.
In a recent report, a research team led by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that fewer than half the emergency
departments in US hospitals had clear policies in place to handle children
with behavior problems. Getting to the bottom of any complex behavior issue can
takes days of patient observation, at minimum, psychiatrists say. And many
emergency departments do not have the on-hand specialists, dedicated space or
off-site resources to help do the job well.
For Jean, diagnosing her son has been complicated. He has since
developed irritable bowel syndrome. “He has been losing weight and started
smoking pot due to the boredom,” Jean said. “This is all due to the anxiety.”
Ann, the consultant in the Bay Area, said that her son’s visit
to the emergency room last month was his third in the past 18 months, each time
for issues related to drug withdrawal. On one visit, he was misdiagnosed with
psychosis and sent to a locked county psychiatric ward. “That experience itself
— locked for days in a ward, with no one telling him why, or how long he’d be
there — was the most traumatic thing he’s experienced,” she said.
Like many other parents, she is now looking after an unstable
child and wondering where to go next. A drug rehab program may be needed as
well as regular therapy.
Lisa has hired a therapist for her son, a Zoom session every
other week. That seems to have helped, she said, but it is too early to tell.
And Jean, for the moment, is hoping the infection risk will diminish soon so
her son can get a safe job.
All three parents have become keen observers of their children,
more aware of shifting moods. Listening by itself usually helps relieve
distress, therapists say. “Trying to educate parents is a routine part of the
job,” said Dr Robert Duffey, a pediatrician in Hendersonville. “And of course,
we need these kids back in school, so badly.”
But medical professional say that until the health care system
finds a way to equip and support emergency departments for what they have
become — the first and sometimes last resort — parents will be left to navigate
mostly on their own, leaning on others who have managed similar problems.
“COVID has put our system under a microscope in terms of the things
that don’t work,” said Baum, the pediatrician in Asheville. “We had a shaky
system of care in pediatric mental health prior to this pandemic, and now we
have all these added stressors on it, all these kids coming in for
pandemic-related issues. Hospitals everywhere are scrambling to adjust.”
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