Parents Often Bring Children to Psychiatric ERs to Calm Them, Study Reveals

Who would have thought that a dispiriting yet familiar sight in emergency rooms would turn out to be children struggling with mental health crises brought in again and again by parents and caregivers who are in fear and overwhelmed, doctors revealed.

As rates and cases of depression and suicidal behavior among adolescents increase, a lot has been written about the rise of pediatric mental health emergency visits. Reports have been made about how patients spend days or even weeks in exam rooms waiting for a rare psychiatric bed to be available.

However, a large study entitled "Mental Health Revisits at US Pediatric Emergency Departments," published Tuesday, revealed a surprising and alarming trend among teen patients who visit the emergency rooms of hospitals repeatedly. These are not the kind of patients that harmed themselves but those whose aggressive behavior and anxiety are too much for their parents and caregivers to manage.

Thus, they are brought in time and time again to be "subdued."

42 percent more revisit rates

"Families come in with their children who have severe behavioral problems, and the families really just are at their wit's end, you know. Their child's behavior may be a danger to themselves, but also to the parents, to the other children in the home," a pediatric emergency room physician at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and one of the study's authors, Dr. Anna M. Cushing, declared.

In most cases, these repeat visitors have received sedatives or other drugs to restrain them from their disruptive behavior.

The study analyzed more than 308,000 mental health visits in 38 hospitals between 2015 and 2020.

The findings stated that patients with psychotic disorders revisited hospitals' emergency rooms 42 percent more within six months compared to those with suicidal or self-harming behavior, The New York Times reported.

Patients with impulse control disorders were 36 percent more likely to revisit. Patients with autism and A.D.H.D. disorders were 22 percent more likely, and the same percentage goes to those who need medications to calm them down compared to patients who did not.

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Emergency rooms medications should be the last resort

According to the study, the constant revisits implied that patients' care in the emergency rooms is inadequate.

An assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Ashley A. Foster, emphasized that as per recommended guidelines, the chemical restraints administered to the patients, like injection or via intravenous drip of benzodiazepines or antipsychotics, should be used as "last resort." This is because they can cause trauma or physical injury not only to the patient but also to the medical staff and even to parents and caregivers, as stated by Yahoo News.

The findings of the research suggested that there should be more studies focusing heavily on families with children who are going through cognitive and behavioral problems and who constantly visit emergency rooms for respite, according to Dr. Cushing.

She added that it is time for these "agitated and behaviorally disregulated patients" to be a concern for discussion "at least on a national scale."

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