Photo by Anthony Fomin, Unsplash
TROUBLED The region’s youth mental health situation is in crisis mode
By Craig Manning If you’ve tried finding a therapist for yourself or your child lately, you’ve probably had a hard time. That’s because northern Michigan doesn’t have the capacity to handle the huge spike in demand for mental health care services that COVID-19 triggered, local mental health professionals say. Even before the pandemic, the region was bound for trouble. National statistics show that demand and need for mental health care among kids and teens have been on a steady rise for years — a precarious powder keg growing more dangerous year after year. COVID-19 lit that powder keg on fire, and now northwest Lower Michigan’s youth mental health situation is in crisis mode. What happens next will depend on a variety of factors: political will, the ability for local players to build bridges and collaborate with one another, and how much empathy parents, teachers, coaches, and other local residents can muster to help destigmatize mental health struggles among youths.
THE NUMBERS In March 2020, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) examined how “mental health problems for which adolescents received care and the service settings where they received care” changed from 2005 to 2018. Across the survey years, more than 230,000 adolescents were surveyed, and 47,090 of them (19.7 percent) received some form of mental health care. First, the good news: The JAMA study actually concluded that “the overall prevalence of mental health care did not change appreciably” from the start of the survey window to the end of it. The bad news is that, even before the pandemic, adolescents were already seeking care for more severe mental health situations than they did back in 2005. At the start of the research window, for instance, struggles with “suicidal ideation and depressive symptoms” made up less than half (48.3 percent) of the visits that youths were making to inpatient or outpatient mental health care settings. By 2017–18, that percentage was up to 57.8 percent.
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Mental health struggles are especially common among girls, the JAMA study found. Female adolescents accounted for 57.5 percent of mental health care visits across the survey period, with incidence rates rising steadily between 2005 and 2018. Researchers ultimately concluded that the increasing severity of mental health problems among adolescents ¬— combined with an uptick in “use of outpatient mental health services” over time — were “placing new demands on specialty adolescent mental health treatment resources.” The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic — which was only just picking up steam when the JAMA study was published — has only made matters worse. According to the CDC, the summer of 2020 saw “a 22.3 percent spike in ER trips for potential suicides by children aged 12–18,” compared to the previous summer. The numbers looked even worse during the winter of 2020–21, when ER visits for potential suicides increased a whopping 39.1 percent year over year. Again, the data suggests that girls are particularly at risk. Between Feb. 21 and March 20 of this year, ER visits for potential suicides were up 50.6 percent for girls aged
12–17, compared to the same one-month stretch in 2019. LOCAL FOCUS These national trends are borne out by local data, too. For instance, North Country Community Mental Health (NCCMH) — which serves the six-county region of Antrim, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Emmet, Kalkaska, and Otsego counties — tracked a 24.6 percent increase in “crisis assessments” at its region’s five hospital emergency departments over the course of its 2021 fiscal year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021. (That number reflects mental health crises for both children and adults.) The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) defines a mental health crisis as “any situation in which a person’s behavior puts them at risk of hurting themselves or others and/or prevents them from being able to care for themselves or function effectively in the community.” “The stats [regarding youth mental health needs] are troubling, even pre-pandemic,” says Gina Aranki, executive director of Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan (CFS). “One stat I heard recently is
