Young Adults Who Need Help With Their Mental Health Rarely Ask For Help And If They Do, They Don’t Ask More Than Once
According to CDC data released earlier this year, over a third of high school students reported suffering from poor mental health; meanwhile, forty-four percent reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless throughout 2021.
Medical professionals around the world already had worries regarding adolescent mental health prior to the pandemic due to social media and other environmental factors.
But, COVID-19 only exacerbated these concerns since increased stress and social isolation resulted in a dramatic uptick in feelings of anxiety and depression among children.
New Zealand has not been immune to the pandemic’s mental health effects on adolescents; instead, medical professionals are becoming increasingly unnerved regarding the level of accessible and responsive mental health care available in the nation.
According to new research published by the Universities of Auckland and Otago, the demand for mental health services has rapidly grown nationwide.
However, the New Zealand government’s latest funding increase for mental health has mainly focused on primary care– which Dr. Hiran Thabrew, one of the researchers, believes is a massive problem.
“That [the funding] is great, but it has been done at the expense of increasing specialist services to meet the increasing demand,” Dr. Thabrew said.
Examples of specialized services that have fallen to the wayside include but are not limited to psychiatry, psychology, and counseling.
Now, medical professionals who specifically offer mental health services are completely overwhelmed.
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According to a survey conducted by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, ninety-seven percent of mental health service providers reported demand has “increased” or “increased a lot” since the onset of the pandemic.
Moreover, eighty-eight percent reported that adolescents were either “often” or “very often” unable to access adequate mental health care when they needed it.
This crisis has frightened doctors throughout the nation since children are already hesitant to ask for help in the first place.
“Young people are notoriously reluctant to reach out for help; so, when they do, it is usually when things are really bad. If they are not seen and responded to, they may not ask for help again,” Dr. Thabrew explained.
Self-harm has also skyrocketed in New Zealand– with rates increasing fifty percent among ten to fourteen-year-olds and twenty-five percent among fifteen to nineteen-year-olds.
Additionally, over five thousand and five hundred young people were admitted to the hospital last year following an incident of self-harm.
Now, the country has the second highest youth suicide rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)– and the researchers are adamant that change must happen fast to save their youth.
“A key lesson from this research is that we urgently need to invest in the mental health workforce,” said Susanna Every-Palmer, the study’s lead author and department head of psychological medicine at the University of Otago.
She believes three critical areas of improvement include the growth of the local mental health specialist workforce, the recruitment of trained professionals from overseas, and the retention of existing staff.
“In addition, we need to be thinking about innovative ways to engage young people– such as using online tools and telehealth and e-health interventions,” Every-Palmer added.
“But, to succeed, it will be important to heed the concerns of those already trying to do the work.”
To read the study’s complete findings published in SAGE Journals, visit the link here.
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