Mental Health Diagnoses Among Publicly Insured Children

In this issue of JAMA, Cummings and colleagues report rates of treatment for mental health diagnoses between 2010 and 2019 among publicly insured children, using administrative data from 22 states. They found increasing rates of most mental health conditions among those children. This aligns with recent evidence showing increasing rates of depression, suicide, and emergency department mental health visits among the general population of children over similar time periods. Together, these analyses suggest that the start of what some describe as a mental health crisis among children in the US likely dates to 2010.