Psychiatric effects of coronavirus ‘could last a decade’

A senior NHS director has warned that children are suffering poor mental health as a result of the coronavirus lockdown, with the psychiatric conditions of the pandemic possibly lasting more than a decade.

Speaking to a Royal Society of Medicine webinar, Professor Tim Kendall, NHS England‘s national clinical director for mental health, said that there is no doubt that children were being hit hard by the impact of the lockdown, and he added that NHS trusts had been told to ‘be more assertive and go out and find children’ who were in difficulty.

He said: “I hear of parents really struggling with doing education at home, really struggling with kids who’ve got neurodevelopmental problems such as ADHD and autism. These kids are under stress, I think now. I think that there’s no doubt that with the data we’re getting now, and we are actively looking at this, children and young people with autism, ADHD particularly, but generally children and young people, I think, are suffering quite a bit with the lockdown.

“It is something we are gearing up about. So we are talking to chief executives, medical directors and helping trusts around the country to step up and start being more assertive to go out and find children.”

His comments follow similar warnings from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who claim that mental health services are dealing with a rise in urgent and emergency cases but also preparing for a ‘tsunami’ of mental illness still to come.

Professor Ed Bullmore, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University,  has suggested that research shows that a number of coronavirus patients experienced a ‘kind of altered mental state’, adding that this included ‘cases of psychosis mood disorder and cognitive impairment’.