Doctors fear new child mental health crisis in UK, made worse by COVID

Some charitable mental health services said they had seen a 70% rise in demand over the past three months, compared with the previous year. The number experiencing eating disorders, self-harm and even psychosis is causing serious concern. There are also warnings that the crisis is having a disproportionate impact on children living in poverty.

Karen Street, officer for mental health at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, told the Observer: “We are all really worried about what we’re already seeing, and really worried about what might be coming. We’re seeing an increased presentation to acute hospitals of children in crisis. What we found in the first lockdown is that things seem to go quite quiet on all fronts right at the beginning, but later there was a really steady and very big surge of young people presenting with eating disorders…

“What we’ve seen from members on eating disorders is that they’ve dropped slightly again in this lockdown. We’re all thinking, gosh, what’s going to happen now when they all go back to school? We’re all just feeling we’re going to see lots of slightly lost, sad, confused, anxious, disorientated kids coming back into school.”