Deconstructing The Rise In Mental Health–Related ED Visits Among Children And Youth In Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental illness is a leading cause of disability among youth. In Ontario, Canada, rates of mental health or addiction-related emergency department (ED) visits continue to rise in children and youth; however, it is unclear what is driving this change. We deconstructed this trend by sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, using linked health administrative data sets. Mental health or addiction-related ED visit rates increased by 89.1 percent between 2006 and 2017, with the greatest rise observed for those ages 14-21, high-acuity cases, and anxiety and mood disorders. We observed a significantly sharp increase after 2009, when several socioenvironmental changes occurred, including the emergence of social media and the Great Recession. Our findings of greater numbers of teenagers and young adults experiencing mental health problems and a shift in acuity and diagnoses have important implications for both ED staffing and outpatient mental illness prevention efforts. Further research is needed to examine whether better case management, care coordination, and after-hours services will help reverse these trends.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".