May 24, 2023 – During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in mental health problems amongst young people, with girls being most affected and adolescents specifically developing eating disorders, in keeping with a report this week in JAMA Network.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in disruptions to daily life, social isolation, economic strain on families, increased use of social media, and reduced access to health care, all of which could negatively impact (mental health),” the authors wrote.
Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Stanford University examined a database of business medical insurance claims. They checked out what number of adolescents ages 6 to 18 were diagnosed with one among 4 mental illnesses from January 2018 to March 2022. The 4 diagnoses were anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and eating disorders.
They found that in a mean month, 25.3% of participants were girls ages 6 to 12, 23.6% were girls ages 13 to 18, 26.5% were boys ages 6 to 12, and 24.5% were boys ages 13 to 18.
“When schools reopened after the first waves of the pandemic (October 2020 to March 2022), the prevalence of all four mental health conditions among girls aged 13 to 18 immediately increased,” the University of Minnesota reported. “Diagnosis of all disorders except depression increased faster during the pandemic than before it. In particular, the prevalence of eating disorders among adolescent girls more than doubled after the start of the pandemic (from 0.26% in March 2020 to 0.56% in March 2022).”
The authors said the study shows the necessity to “identify the underlying factors associated with the increase in (mental health) diagnoses among female adolescents (e.g. social isolation or increasing dependence on social media) so that targeted containment strategies can be developed to reverse the alarming trend that has continued even several years after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The authors also identified that the study only included adolescents who had private insurance, and that the recorded diagnoses of mental health problems may not reflect the actual condition of the adolescents within the study.