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Editor’s Note: This article contains references to suicide.

Over the past year, Jennifer Rapke has seen an increase in child psychiatric patients experiencing anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts or attempts.

Rapke, the chief of the child psychiatry consultation liaison service at Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital in Syracuse, said the increase is an indicator of the mental toll the pandemic and online learning have had on children.

“If I had to pick one thing we’ve heard from most kids, it’s the word ‘isolation,’” Rapke said. “The trigger that seems to be the most common is kids reporting they feel incredibly isolated … and totally burned out on online content.”

Pediatric mental health providers in Syracuse told The Daily Orange that the pandemic and virtual learning have negatively impacted children’s mental health over the past year.

The children’s hospital hasn’t experienced a massive increase in its overall volume of pediatric psychiatric patients, but the intensity of the symptoms that patients report has been much greater, Rapke said.

In recent months, some aspects of life have started to resemble pre-pandemic life, but the limitations on in-person schooling and extracurricular activities have remained strict, she said.

Children and teens have essentially been “stuck in an earlier phase of COVID” while the world around them moves on, she said.

“There’s this whole group of kids under the age of 18 that haven’t even gotten back to basic daily life, like most of us have,” Rapke said. “These kids feel like they’re never getting out, and nothing has changed, and nothing’s getting better.”

Schools in Onondaga County can now expand in-person learning. The county’s health department announced a proposal March 4 to reduce classroom social distancing requirements from six feet to three feet — a policy that local pediatric mental health providers say can’t come soon enough.

Since the start of the pandemic, a greater number of children both nationally and in Onondaga County have displayed behavioral disorders and mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation, said Dr. Geoffrey Hopkins, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center.

These issues can be directly linked back to the prevalence of remote learning over the past year, he said.

“We didn’t realize what an important cornerstone to social and emotional development that being in person for your education really was,” he said. “When one incubator for (this) development is taken away … it opens them up to magnification of preexisting mental health issues or behavioral problems, or the development of new ones.”

Until now, most schools in the county have been utilizing a hybrid learning model in which students attend classes in person on some days and learn remotely on other days.

For many children, especially those with attentional difficulties like ADHD or learning style differences, remote learning has sharply reduced the amount of academic support services they receive, Hopkins said.

Maya Goosman | Design Editor

When these children struggle with their school work at home, it can worsen their self-esteem or increase anxiety or depression they feel in relation to school.

Over the past year, more than 400 children under 17 have received inpatient psychiatric care at Syracuse hospitals, according to Ron Lagor, the executive director of the Hospital Executive Council, a planning organization for three central New York hospitals.

The number of hospitalizations has steadily increased since the start of the pandemic, with the number of inpatient stays during January 2021 almost double those in March 2020.

Hopkins said the number of children and teens utilizing St. Joseph’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program has been slightly higher than normal over the past year, but the mental health issues these patients have exhibited have been much more severe.

The pandemic has also had a significant effect on the number of children who require referrals to outpatient psychiatric care, Hopkins said. The need for outpatient care has increased dramatically over the past year, which has begun to strain the already limited system of pediatric mental health services in the county, he said.

Many local mental health care programs were also forced to reduce their offerings or completely eliminate their services as a result of the pandemic, making it even harder for patients to obtain access to the care they need, Rapke said.

Both Rapke and Hopkins agree that allowing more Onondaga County students to return to in-person learning will alleviate the mental health issues many have experienced over the past year.

“The benefits far outweigh the risk at this point,” Rapke said. “We’re almost at the point of having a pandemic of its own in terms of mental health, and I’m worried that if we don’t take the risk of safely putting people back in the classroom, we’re going to have another pandemic on our hands.”

Visit SuicideIsPreventable.org to learn about the warning signs for suicide and find local resources in your county. If you or someone you know may be at risk, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 for immediate help.

Published on April 5, 2021 at 11:12 pm

Contact Gillian: gifollet@syr.edu