Sounding the Alarm for Children’s Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasingly, research confirms the negative effects of COVID-19 safety measures on the mental health of children and adolescents.[1][2][3][4][5] Saunders and colleagues 6 call for an urgent response to the increasing sustained demand for mental health services inclusive of substance use and developmental disorders.The authors' population-based cross-sectional study used linked administrative and health data to examine changes in utilization of physician-provided mental health services for 2.5 million children and adolescents aged 3 to 17 years in Ontario, Canada.From March 2020 through February 2021, the authors found a rapid and sustained 10% increase in outpatient mental health service utilization by children and adolescents compared with prior rates.Similar trends were not observed for acute mental health service utilization for the same period, except for girls.The current study found striking sex differences with substantially higher rates of utilization observed for acute inpatient psychiatric hospitalization and outpatient mental health services for school-aged and adolescent girls.The authors hypothesized that there would be a large, rapid shift toward virtual care that would be sustained throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and that utilization would vary by diagnostic groups and age.Thus, they examined variations in utilization of virtual care by diagnostic groups and adoption of telehealth as a modality for treatment.Rapid major shifts in utilization of virtual visits occurred very early during the COVID-19 pandemic and were sustained at approximately 70% of treatment.6 Increased rates of substance use disorders and psychotic disorders occurred early and were sustained at levels higher than expected, although they represent a small proportion of visits.The largest increases were noted for mood and anxiety disorders (74.7%), psychosis (73.2%), substance use (83.6%), social problems (64.6%), and neurodevelopmental disorders (69.8%).Saunders and colleagues 6 join the growing number of investigators confirming the substantial mental health outcomes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in youth and a need to respond to the increasing demand for services.The authors highlight the need for a systematic response to address increasing mental health needs, including variations in demand by age and sex differences noted across studies.[6][7][8] The results of this population-based study suggest that youth in Ontario are experiencing increasing psychological distress that underlies the 10% greater utilization of physician-provided outpatient mental health services.Although this study highlighted increasing mental health service needs for children and adolescents during the COVID-19
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".