COVID lockdown trauma takes toll on teens

Secret Andrews government report reveals soaring numbers of mental health emergencies including self-harm, suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among children.

Camberwell doctor Stacey Harris. Picture: Mark Stewart

Soaring numbers of children and teenagers are self-harming, ­battling suicidal thoughts and suffering eating disorders as the long-term trauma of the pandemic and last year’s marathon lockdown continues to hit young Victorians.

A confidential 47-page ­Andrews government report, seen by The Weekend Australian, reveals alarming levels of mental health emergencies among youths in February and March this year. The Victorian Agency for Health Information report – Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Services in Victoria – reveals “significant variances” on pre-coronavirus levels across key psychiatric categories.

The report shows that in the six weeks to March 28, average weekly emergency department presentations for children and teenagers, aged up to 17, was running at 319, a 27 per cent increase on the 251 cases for the same ­period in 2020. The number of teenagers rushed to hospital after self-harming and suffering suicidal thoughts spiked by 51 per cent, rising from a weekly average of 98 in 2020 to 148 this year.

The most serious cases, where teenagers have needed resuscitation and emergency care, ­jumped 44.9 per cent, with the 2020 weekly average of 19.8 rising to 28.7 in 2021.

A child and adolescent psychiatrist said the confidential data confirmed what many frontline medical experts were seeing daily.

“This reflects the extended trauma that was sustained last year,” the mental health expert said. “The effects are still very much resonating; the lockdown, the isolation, the interruption to schooling and routine.

“These are things that anecdotally we have seen so many kids, whose schooling and wellbeing were thrown off course, continue to struggle with. Life getting back to normal is not enough to undo the damage.”

Doctors and child psychiatrists believe the data – kept under wraps by the Andrews government – confirms the devastating impact of last year’s 111-day lockdown on the mental health of young Victorians.

Doctors have told The Weekend Australian there is a high public interest in the mental health data being released, but the VAHI report is marked “confidential” and doctors are advised that if they receive the report in error they should “destroy it”.

The Minister for Mental Health, James Merlino, said the government had committed a ­record $3.8 billion in 2021-22 to rebuild the state’s mental health system. More than $800 million of this is directly supporting children through additional beds and services. “We know how tough this pandemic is for the Victorian community and recognise that the mental health impacts can be long lasting,” he said.

Among the hardest hit by the lockdown, the report suggests, are girls aged 12 and above who are battling a wave of serious eating disorders. The six-week average to February 28 saw known patient treatment numbers jump from 279 in 2020 to 352 this year, an ­increase of 26 per cent.

The number of new eating disorder cases in the same period ­increased by 34 per cent, rising from a weekly average of 654 in 2020 to 878 in 2021.

Camberwell doctor Stacey Harris said she and her colleagues were grappling with a major spike in eating disorders among teenage girls. “Eating disorders have just ramped up,” she said. “I’d see one patient every three months before Covid and lockdown … then it jumped to one a week. I know a paediatrician who was seeing three to five per month; post-lockdown that has gone to five to seven cases a week.”

Dr Harris said some teenage girls became anorexic during lockdown as a way of dealing with anxiety and a loss of control. “Teenage girls learnt in lockdown how to control their eating, and it’s just kept accelerating, it has just gone nuts,” she said.

“They were anxious and sad about not seeing their friends and not having any control over their situation, so it’s all about control. One thing they can control is their eating. It was a control mechanism born out of anxiety.”

One mental health expert said Melbourne’s fourth lockdown would retraumatise children.