Teens Report More Traumatic Events, Suicidal Behaviors During Pandemic

ACROSS AMERICA — A majority of U.S. high school students said they experienced at least one traumatic event during the COVID-19 pandemic that negatively affected their mental health or caused them to think about suicide, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About three in four students answering the 2021 Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey said they had experienced at least one incident of traumatic or upsetting events known as ACEs — or adverse childhood experiences — in 2020. About 12 percent of students surveyed said they had at least three instances of ACEs in 2020.

The more ACEs, the more profound the effect on mental health and the more likely students were to seriously consider suicide or make suicide plan, according to the report.

As more data becomes available, health care professionals and educators are getting a clearer look at the effects of the pandemic on America’s school children.

The CDC report, bookended Monday by a national report card that showed students have fallen back in critical math and reading scores since 2019, is the latest indication yet that students are returning to classrooms emotionally unprepared to learn. Earlier this month, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that health care providers screen children and teenagers for anxiety, one of the outcomes for people with ACEs.

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“We’re seeing a lot of young people when they’re returning back to school having issues with social anxiety,” Dr. Anisha Abraham, performing chief of adolescent and younger grownup medication at Kids’s Nationwide Hospital, told USA Today. “It’s so important to identify these issues before it gets worse so they can get support.”

Dr. Kayla Anderson, an epidemiologist at the CDC’s division of violence prevention and lead author of the ACEs study, told the newspaper the findings are consistent with previous findings that “all forms of abuse as well as many ACEs are associated with poor outcomes.”

“Emotional abuse may play a relatively larger role in adolescents mental health,” she said.

The survey was answered by 4,390 18-year-old high school students who self-reported a range of ACEs — from physical, sexual, dating and emotional violence to cyberbullying to food insecurity and loss of a family member or caregiver — during the pandemic or the last 12 months.

They were asked if they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and whether they’d thought seriously about suicide.

About 20 percent of students who reported at least one ACE reported feeling actively suicidal during the past year. About 55 percent of students who had experienced four or more ACEs were actively suicidal, according to the report.

The actual rates of suicide ranged from 5 percent among students who experienced no ACEs to 35 percent among those who had experienced four or more.

About 30 percent of those who reported one ACE also reported poor mental health over the past 30 days, and around 65 percent of those who reported four or more ACEs said the same thing.

For comparison, only about 15 percent of students who said they had experienced no ACEs said their mental health suffered during the pandemic.

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Anxiety and depression among children ages 3-17 was increasing before the pandemic, according to a National Survey of Children's Health analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics. More than 5.6 million kids, 9 percent of those in that age group, had been diagnosed with anxiety by 2020, an increase of 27 percent.

At the same time, the consumption of mental health services not only did not increase, it decreased slightly. In 2020, 80 percent of kids who needed counseling or mental health services received them over the past year, down from 82 percent who got care in 2016