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 recently in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that the number of paediatric visits rose to 9.7% in 2023 from 5.7% in 2014.
The study included all insurance claims for children from ages one 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% during that period, to 6.1% in 2023 from 1.7% 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.”
Increased screening for kids
Smaller increases were seen for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which rose to 6.7% from 5%; depression, which rose to 1.6% from 1.2% over the same period; autism spectrum disorder, which rose to 2% from 0.5%; and trauma, which rose to 1.6% from 0.8%.
The fact that reports of anxiety so far outstripped the other conditions that were screened for, Brahim said, suggests “that there’s a true underlying change in symptoms.”
Though the Covid-19 pandemic clearly exacerbated paediatric mental health problems, Brahim said, the trends found in the study preceded it.
Increased screening for paediatric mental health could also be a contributing factor, she said. In 2022, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer panel composed of medical experts, recommended that all children ages eight and older be screened for anxiety in primary care settings. But this occurred late in the study period, and so did not account for the rise in anxiety, Brahim said.
“I think that, because of this, it’s likely that documented rates of anxiety will probably continue to rise over time, much beyond the study period we examined here,” she said. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
The article originally appeared in https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/science/anxiety-mental-health-children-increases-study.html
