US children are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although the rates of non--psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, according to a study.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for five to 13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens, said the study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available,” said Joseph Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, the study’s author.
“It [hospitalization] is a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit,” he added, saying that such moves were a last resort.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten years of the study, which was based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
For adolescents, the rate increased from 683 to 969 per 100,000, while it went up from 921 to 996 for adults and dropped from 978 to 808 for people aged 65 and older.
For youngsters, bipolar disorder showed the steepest increase, while anxiety diagnoses dropped.
Although there have been concerns about over diagnosis of bipolar disorder and other mental problems among children, Blader said that was unlikely to be hiking the rates because hospitalizations are based on whether or not people are considered a danger to themselves or others, not psychiatric labels.
“Most typically, it’s volatile and aggressive behavior, or overreaction to minor provocations that lead to assaults on family members or peers,” he said. “Whereas before, we had hoped that more outpatient services would lead to a decrease in hospitalizations, the findings suggest a pressing need to learn what might have reversed that trend.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS