Children’s Mental Health Visits Have Shot Up, Research Shows

A study of insurance claims for 1.8 million children found that the number of families raising mental health issues at visits to general practitioners rose sharply over a decade, with anxiety by far the fastest-growing complaint.

The study, which was published on Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that the number of pediatric visits rose to 9.7 percent in 2023 from 5.7 percent in 2014.

The study included all insurance claims for children from ages 1 to 18 in Massachusetts, for a total of more than 1.8 million children. Visits were counted as mental health visits if a diagnostic code was included in the claim, either because the child or the family raised the issue or because the child screened positive for mental health symptoms during the visit.

Visits for anxiety rose by more than 250 percent during that period, to 6.1 percent in 2023 from 1.7 percent in 2014.

Megan Cole Brahim, an associate professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and an author of the paper, said her team had been surprised by “the rapid increase in pediatric anxiety visits in particular, which just far outpaced the growth of all other mental health diagnoses.”

Smaller increases were seen for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., which rose to 6.7 percent from 5.0 percent; depression, which rose to 1.6 percent from 1.2 percent over the same period; autism spectrum disorder, which rose to 2.0 percent from 0.5 percent; and trauma, which rose to 1.6 percent from 0.8 percent.