At what cost? A qualitative study of youth and families’ experiences of psychiatric hospitalization in Canada at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with increased diagnoses of psychiatric disorders and a rise in psychiatric hospitalizations in children and youth in Canada. The collateral effects of the pandemic on children and youth have been well documented in many domains. However, the impact of pandemic restrictions in child and youth psychiatric inpatient milieux has been largely ignored. This study aimed to understand youth and families' experiences of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization in Canada during the height of the pandemic (2020-2022). We conducted focus groups with youth and family members. Our findings highlight that youth and their kin experienced multiple forms of deprivation, including physical isolation and separation from family. Participants were unanimous in reporting that quality of care was significantly compromised, which they felt led to poorer outcomes. We reflect on the challenges of preserving the relational components of care in a time of crisis, the carcerality of COVID-19 isolation practices, and how the turn toward risk management culture was met with resistance and distrust by youth and their families. We discuss how many findings are reflective of trends in inpatient care overall, not only in times of crisis, and suggest that COVID-19 may have brought into focus fault lines that require a rethinking of child and youth inpatient practices. Nonetheless, the insights from this study can help with guiding policy in future crises, including involving children and families in policy development, reducing potentially traumatizing practices of quarantine and isolation, and maintaining flexibility when applying restrictive regulations to youth mental health patients. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".