Parents Often Bring Children to Psychiatric E.R.s to Subdue Them, Study Finds

NYT HEALTH: Parents Often Bring Children to Psychiatric E.R.s to Subdue Them, Study Finds
By Ellen Barry
Section: Health
Source: New York Times
Published Date: December 27, 2022 at 02:00AM

Many parents bring children to emergency rooms to manage aggressive behaviors. But the visits offer little long-term benefit, doctors said.

For emergency room doctors, they are a dispiriting and familiar sight: Children who return again and again in the grip of mental health crises, brought in by caregivers who are frightened or overwhelmed.
Much has been written about the surge in pediatric mental health emergency visits in recent years, as rates of depression and suicidal behavior among teens surged. Patients often spend days or weeks in exam rooms waiting for a rare psychiatric bed to open up, sharply reducing hospital capacity.
But a large study published on Tuesday found a surprising trend among adolescents who repeatedly visited the hospital. The patients most likely to reappear in emergency rooms were not patients who harmed themselves, but rather those whose agitation and aggressive behavior proved too much for their caregivers to manage.
In many cases, repeat visitors had previously received sedatives or other drugs to restrain them when their behavior became disruptive.
“Families come in with their children who have severe behavioral problems, and the families really just are at their wit’s end, you know,” said Dr. Anna M. Cushing, a pediatric emergency room physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of the authors of the study. “Their child’s behavior may be a danger to themselves, but also to the parents, to the other children in the home.”
The findings, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed more than 308,000 mental health visits at 38 hospitals between 2015 and 2020.
Compared with patients presenting with suicidal or self-harming behavior, those with psychotic disorders were 42 percent more likely to revisit the emergency department within six months, the study found; patients with impulse control disorders were 36 percent more likely; and patients with disorders like autism and A.D.H.D. were 22 percent more likely. Patients who required medications to subdue them were 22 percent more likely to revisit than patients who did not.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/health/children-emergency-room-mental-health.html

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