Children as Young as 8 Should Be Screened for Anxiety, Experts Recommend
All children should be screened for anxiety starting as young as 8 years old, government-backed experts recommended, providing fresh guidance as doctors and parents warn of a worsening mental-health crisis among young people in the pandemic’s wake.
The draft guidance marks the first time the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has made a recommendation on screening children and adolescents for anxiety. The task force, a panel of independent, volunteer experts that makes recommendations on matters such as screening for diabetes and cancer, also reiterated on Tuesday its 2016 guidance that children between ages 12 and 18 years old should be screened for major depressive disorder.
“What the pandemic has done is, it exacerbated a pre-existing issue,” said Nasuh Malas, director of pediatric consultation and liaison psychiatry services at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., who isn’t on the task force. “These guidelines are a preliminary step to many, many steps that we need to take nationally as a community of people who are concerned about our youth.”
The pandemic added new stressors including isolation, disruption of routine and uncertainty. Many young people lost family members to Covid-19, got sick themselves or missed out on milestones like sports seasons, recitals and graduations. For some, particularly children who already experienced anxiety, heading back into the classroom after months of remote learning presented its own fears and struggles.
More than one-in-three high-school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic through June 2021, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of more than 7,700 students. About 44% said they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness within the 12 months before the survey.
