The fact that the corona pandemic has damaged the mental health of many children and young people is not new. Nevertheless, the numbers that the DAK is now presenting are alarming. Eating disorders among young girls increased by 130 percent. Not the only reason for concern.
Munich (dpa/lby) – Eating disorders and mental illnesses such as depression among Bavarian children and adolescents also increased, in some cases massively, in the second year of the pandemic, 2021. While the number of new mental illnesses rose almost exclusively among young people, primarily among girls, doctors found serious obesity more frequently in all age groups and genders. This emerges from the child and youth report of the health insurance company DAK, which was available to the German Press Agency in advance. These are not the only negative developments that the experts are reading from the statistics compared to the time before the pandemic.
“According to the current state of knowledge, children do not play the main role in the spread of the virus, but there is a risk that they will be among its biggest victims in the long term,” the authors of the analysis summarize. The scientists had evaluated the data for the years 2018 to 2021 from around 107,000 children and young people from Bavaria who were insured with the DAK. The results are considered to be representative of all young people in Bavaria.
According to this, the number of visits to the doctor during the pandemic decreased overall, with respiratory diseases, infectious diseases and muscular and skeletal diseases occurring less frequently. At the same time, the number of newly diagnosed mental illnesses and behavioral disorders increased – especially among older school children (10-14 years) and adolescents (15-17 years).
Compared to the pre-pandemic year 2019, there was an increase in depressive episodes among 10 to 14-year-olds, with an increase of 16 percent. Nationwide, the increase in this diagnosis was only nine percent.
Reactions to severe stress and adjustment disorders as well as mental physical illnesses caused the highest incidence rates among young people. The former have increased by 19 percent since 2019; in 2021, three percent of all young people in Bavaria received a corresponding diagnosis for the first time. The number of newly diagnosed anxiety disorders rose even more sharply with an increase of 45 percent, emotional disorders (30 percent) and depression (25 percent). The increase in depression is solely due to the girls, because the rate of new illnesses in boys fell both in school and in adolescence.
The young girls are also worried in other areas: the number of people newly suffering from eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia (“eating and vomiting addiction”) has increased by 130 percent since 2019; the increase has recently accelerated. The plus was 51 percent for anxiety disorders and 40 percent for depression. In addition, younger girls between the ages of five and nine were conspicuously diagnosed with obesity, i.e. extreme overweight, for the first time with a plus of 27 percent.
The scientists were also able to see in the statistics that three clinical pictures were conspicuously common in children and adolescents from families with difficult social or financial circumstances: depression, eating disorders and obesity. Newly diagnosed anxiety disorders, on the other hand, were particularly common in adolescent girls from families with a high socio-economic status.
