3.78 Mental Health Problems During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Dutch Children and Adolescents With and Without Pre-existing Mental Health Problems

Objectives

Research has shown that mental health problems in children and adolescents have increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to investigate changes in mental health throughout the pandemic and whether changes in children with pre-existing mental health problems differ from those in children from the general population.

Methods

We included children and adolescents (8-18 years old) who receive psychiatric care (N_T1 = 270; N_T2 = 413; N_T3 = 243; N_T4 = 226; N_T5 = 228) and children from the general population (N_T1 = 486; N_T2 = 440; N_T3 = 413; N_T4 = 414; N_T5 = 529) for whom we assessed self-reported mental health problems at 5 time points: April 2020, November 2020, March 2021, November 2021, and March 2022. For the general population, prepandemic data were also available (N_T0 = 527-1319). The main outcome measures were Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) domains: Anxiety, Depressive Symptoms, Anger, Sleep-Related Impairment, Global Health, and Peer Relations. We performed ANOVAs to test whether mental health problems changed per moment in time. We included age and gender as covariates.

Results

In the psychiatric sample, all outcome measures except Peer Relations differed significantly across moments (all p < .01), with the highest problems being reported in March 2022. In the general population sample, problems on each outcome measure were significantly higher than prepandemic (all p < .01), with the highest problems being reported in March 2021 but they seemed to start normalizing thereafter.

Conclusions

Our results show that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the mental health of children in psychiatric care is deteriorating. The mental health of children from the general population is still worse than before the pandemic but seems to have started to normalize. Our findings indicate that the pandemic may have long-term effects on child mental health and that children with pre-existing mental health problems are more vulnerable to these effects. This is an important message for child and adolescent psychiatry because these children may require comparatively more care in the long term.

EPI, SAC, MCS