Beginning in April 2020, the proportion of children’s mental health-related emergency department (ED) visits among all pediatric ED visits increased and remained elevated through October 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
Compared with 2019, the proportion of mental health-related visits for children aged 5-11 and 12-17 years increased approximately 24 percent and 31 percent, respectively.
To assess changes in mental health-related ED visits among U.S. children, the CDC analyzed data from its National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) from January 1 through October 17, 2020 and compared them with data from the same period in 2019.
From January 1-March 15, 2020, the average reported number of children’s mental health-related ED visits overall was higher in 2020 than in 2019, whereas the proportion of children’s mental health-related visits was similar. Beginning March 16, concurrent with the widespread implementation of COVID-19 mitigation measures, the number of mental health-related ED visits among children decreased 43 percent. Simultaneously, the proportion of mental health-related ED visits increased sharply beginning in mid-March 2020 and continued into October, compared with the same period in 2019.
The CDC noted that the increased proportion of children’s mental health-related ED visits from March-October 2020 might be artificially inflated as a consequence of the substantial decrease in overall ED visits during the same period and variation in the number of EDs reporting to NSSP.
