PARIS – By the time his parents took him to the hospital, 11-year-old Pablo had barely eaten and stopped drinking altogether. Weakened by months of self-privatization, his heart had slowed and his kidneys were sweating. Healers took him in with fluids and passed him through a tube – the first steps towards sewing together but another baby coming apart amid a coronavirus crisis.
For doctors who treat them, the impact of pandemic on children ‘s mental health is becoming increasingly frightening. The Paris pediatric hospital that cares for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of young children and teens needing treatment after attempting suicide since September.
Doctors elsewhere report similar pressure, with children – some as young as 8 – deliberately running into traffic, taking too much pill weight and committing self-harm otherwise. In Japan, child and adolescent suicide hit the highest levels in 2020, according to the Ministry of Education.
Pediatric psychologists say they also see children with phobias related to coronavirus, tics and eating disorders, worrying about infection, scratching their raw hands, covering their bodies with disinfectant gel and fear of getting sick from food.
Also increasingly common, doctors say, are children suffering from panic attacks, heart palpitations and other symptoms of mental disturbance, as well as harmful additives to mobile devices and computer screens that have become loaded. , teachers and their entertainment during locks, invitations and school closures.
“There is no prototype for the child with complications,” said Dr Richard Delorme, who heads the psychiatric unit that treats Pablo at Robert Debré’s hospital, the busiest in France. . “It simply came to our notice then. ”
Pablo’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually fell ill with an eating disorder as he contracted the pandemic, slowly starving until the same foods he ate very little rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes.
Jerome suspects that last year’s riots over Pablo’s practices may have contributed to his illness. With France locked up, the boy had no inside classes for months and could not say goodbye to his friends and teacher at the end of the school year.
“It was very sad,” Jerome said. “This is a generation that has struck a blow.”
At times, other factors bore the brunt of the burden of the 2.6 million COVID-19 victims who have died in the world’s worst health crisis in a century.
Islamic State militants who killed 130 people in gun and bomb attacks across Paris in 2015, including at a cafe on Pablo’s trip to school, left a study mark of his childhood. Pablo used to believe that the café’s dead customers were buried under the pavement where he was arguing.
By the time he was in hospital in late February, Pablo had lost a third of his previous weight. His heart rate was so slow that healers struggled to find a pulse, and one of his kidneys failed, said his father, who agreed to talk about his son’s illness on an unrecognizable condition. They are their surname.
“It’s a really bad night for a child to destroy themselves,” said the father.
Hospital psychologist Pablo at the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, says some of her other young patients reported eating disorders, mostly between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. age, they started locking in gaining weight because they couldn’t stay active. One boy was compensated by running paws in his parents’ basement for hours each day, losing weight so quickly that he had to go to hospital.
Others told her that they were gradually limiting their diet: “No more sugar, then no fat, and finally nothing more,” she said.
Some children try to keep the mental anguish to themselves, not wanting to put more of a burden on the adults in their lives who may be mourning loved ones or lost jobs the coronavirus . They “try to be forgotten children, who don’t add to their parents’ problems, ”Stordeur said.
Children may also lack the vocabulary of mental illness to show their need for help and to link their problems to the pandemic.
“They don’t say,‘ Yes, I ended up here because of the coronavirus, ’” Delorme said. “But what they tell you about a chaotic world is, of‘ Yes, I don’t do my More activities, “I don’t do my music anymore,” “It’s hard to go to school in the mornings,” “I have trouble waking up,” “I’m crushed by the mask.”
Dr David Greenhorn said the emergency department at Bradford Royal Infirmary where he works in the north of England used to treat one or two children a week for a mental health emergency, including suicide attempts. The average is now closer to one or two a day, sometimes including children as young as 8, he said.
“This is an international disease, and we don’t recognize it,” Greenhorn said in a telephone interview. “In the life of an 8-year-old child, a year is a real, really long, time. They’re seven you will see no end to it. ”
At Robert Debré, the psychiatric unit typically saw about 20 suicide cases per month involving children ages 15 and younger. Not only has that number now doubled in some months since September, but some children seem to be ever more determined to end their lives, Delorme said.
“We are amazed at the intensity of the desire to die among children who may be 12 or 13 years old,” he said. Sometimes we have 9 children who already want to die. And it’s not just motivation or blackmail through suicide. It’s a real desire to end their lives. ”
“Stress levels in children are very high,” he said. “The crisis is affecting us all, from the ages of 2 to 99.”
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Added by AP writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo.
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