Suicide-related emergency department visits among children in the U.S. increased by 74%, highlighting a growing concern for children’s mental health.
Researchers examined emergency department data to better understand changes in suicide-related visits among children.
The findings offer insight into the scale of the issue and why recognizing children’s mental health needs matters.
When a child is experiencing a mental health crisis, getting help quickly can make a meaningful difference. But emergency departments across the country are facing increasing demand for care, including visits involving suicide or self-injury.
A new study published in Annals of Emergency Medicine found that suicide-related emergency department visits among children increased by 74% between 2016 and 2022.
The research also highlights a challenge for families: Not every emergency department has the specialized resources needed to care for children experiencing a mental health crisis.
“A child experiencing a mental health crisis may arrive at any emergency department. Our findings underscore the need to equip every ED – not only large pediatric centers – with tools and resources to provide evidence-based mental health care,” lead author Audrey Brewer, MD, MPH, a pediatrician and researcher at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said in a news release.
“Strengthening mental and behavioral health capacity across all emergency care settings is essential to ensuring children receive timely, effective and equitable care.”
How researchers examined children’s emergency visits
Researchers analyzed more than five million emergency department visits involving mental health concerns among children ages 5 to 17 across the U.S. The study used data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, a database that allowed researchers to examine children’s visits to emergency departments between 2016 and 2022.
The team focused on visits where children had a primary mental health diagnosis, looking at the types of concerns bringing them to emergency departments and the hospitals where they received care.
Researchers also examined differences between hospitals based on how many children they typically treated each year. Hospitals seeing fewer than 10,000 children annually were classified as having lower pediatric patient volumes.
What the findings mean for families
Along with the 74% increase in suicide-related visits, researchers found that overall pediatric mental health-related emergency visits increased by 24% during the study period. Suicide or self-injury accounted for 24% of mental health visits, while depressive disorders accounted for 23%.
About half of all suicide-related emergency visits occurred at hospitals with lower pediatric patient volumes. At hospitals with the lowest pediatric volumes, nearly 30% of children seen for mental health concerns were transferred to another hospital for care.
Researchers say these findings highlight the importance of ensuring that all emergency departments can respond to children experiencing mental health crises. That includes training staff, providing access to pediatric mental health professionals in person or through telehealth, screening children for suicide risk, and helping families connect with follow-up care.
For parents and caregivers, the findings underscore the importance of seeking help when a child is struggling and ensuring they have a clear plan for support after an emergency visit.
“To improve care, ED-based mental health interventions need to be developed and tested for children of color, since many have not been studied in diverse populations,” added Dr. Brewer. “Delivering culturally responsive evidence-based interventions for children in the community and outpatient primary care settings can help to potentially lessen ED reliance for mental health care and may help reduce disparities in youth mental health outcomes.”