«Between 2011 and 2021 we went from 155 to 1,824 visits per year to the emergency room for adolescents who needed the support of a neuropsychiatrist. A decade of exponential growth in requests for help, so much so that even before Covid we had reached 1,059 urgent accesses a year, but the coronavirus has led to an explosion of mood disorders, depression and anxiety that does not fall within and a notable increase in cases of self-harm and suicidal ideation especially among girls. Stefano Vicari, full professor at Cattolica and director of the Child Neuropsychiatry Complex Operational Unit of the Irccs Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome, takes stock of what is only the tip of the iceberg of malaise.
Your hospital is the litmus test of both discomfort and gaps in care…
Today we have reached just over a hundred beds reserved only for psychiatry for the developmental age, but at least five Regions – Calabria, Umbria, Abruzzo, Molise and Valle d’Aosta – do not have dedicated beds. Once hospitalization is over, families often don’t know who to turn to: a child neuropsychiatry care network would be needed, which does not exist today, with teams in the local health authorities both for prevention and for early taking charge and treatment. Our NHS is calibrated on the needs of adults, it doesn’t take into account that most mental disorders start in the developmental age. Then training must be rethought: pediatricians rarely study psychiatry but if suicide is the second cause of death between the ages of 10 and 25, these evaluations should also be included in the “health reports”. We are talking about at least 10% of children and 20% of adolescents with mental health disorders.
The pandemic has exacerbated an existing phenomenon: the causes?
Protective factors such as school, family and relationships have weakened over the years. In a context of total inattention to young people, school is increasingly competitive and less willing to cultivate relationships, parents struggle also due to lack of time to take care of the children and set rules, social media and substance abuse are spreading. Suffice it to say that the first contact with cannabinoids, closely linked in adolescence to the risk of mental disorders, takes place in sixth grade.