Rates of psychiatric diagnoses for children and adolescents shifted meaningfully between 2013 and 2021. Anxiety and depression diagnoses became more common while some other diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, declined. Externalizing disorders characterized by aggression and defiance may be less frequent as youth spend more time alone and on phones. Multiple factors can drive diagnostic trends, including conceptual changes in psychiatry, diagnostic practices, social and behavioral shifts, and patterns of service use. Analysis covered millions of publicly funded youth mental health records nationwide. The underlying causes of these changing rates remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
The rates of various psychiatric diagnoses as applied to children and adolescents can change quite a bit over time for various reasons. There is much debate about the increased prevalence of diagnoses such as autism and ADHD over the past 30 years or so. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was also a dramatic and controversial increase in the number of youth being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in part due to a shift in how the disorder was conceptualized by mental health professionals.
To get a better sense of recent trends, a team of researchers well known for examining different shifts in mental health behaviors and treatments examined millions of mental health records from youth all over the country who received services at publicly funded treatment services from the years 2013 to 2021. The main finding was that there were indeed some major changes in the rate of various diagnoses being applied across the study period, but the direction of these changes varied considerably from diagnosis to diagnosis.
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