Nearly 1 in 3 children in the United States have diagnosed mental health or behavioral disorders, but only half of them are accessing needed treatment.
As a result, more families are turning to pediatricians to address their children’s mental health needs, a new large-scale study shows. This highlights the demand for primary care doctors to receive more specialized training on screening and treatment psychiatric disorders, researchers say.
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“Since nearly all children have access to primary care, this creates a major opportunity,” Megan Cole, the study’s senior author and a professor at Harvard Medical School, said in a press release. “With the right training and support, primary care practices can help screen, diagnose, and treat mental health conditions or connect families to care.”
The study, published online Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, examined insurance claim diagnostic codes filed for nearly 2 million children in Massachusetts between 2014 and 2023.
The analysis showed that pediatric visits for mental health issues jumped to 9.7% in 2023 from 5.9% in 2014. The surge in visits for anxiety was most dramatic, increasing approximately 300% over the decade, to 6.1% in 2023 from 1.7% in 2014.
Cole told the New York Times that she and her colleagues had been surprised by “the rapid increase in pediatric anxiety visits in particular, which just far outpaced the growth of all other mental health diagnoses.”
Visits for other behavioral health issues also increased but at slower rates. The percentage of pediatrician visits for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder rose to 6.7% in 2023 from 5% in 2014. The percentage for depression rose to 1.6% from 1.2%.
The increases may be partly due to improved screening for mental health issues, but that alone would not account for the magnitude of the findings – and neither would the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s mental health because the study period preceded its onset, researchers said.
“I think that, because of this, it’s likely that documented rates of anxiety will probably continue to rise over time, much beyond the study period we examined here,” Cole told the New York Times.
The findings were limited by the fact that they came only from data in Massachusetts.
Still, the results underscore the need for the integration of psychotherapy and other treatments for anxiety, ADHD and other mental health issues in primary care settings, the researchers said.