Hospitalizations for eating disorders spiked during the pandemic, doubling among adolescent girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While most teens have returned to a normal life of in-person school, sports and social activities, eating disorders, especially anorexia, remain at an all-time high, experts warn.
‘The kids are not OK,’ said Melissa Freizinger, the associate director of the eating disorder program at Boston Children’s Hospital. ‘As the pandemic started and then progressed, we kept thinking, “Oh, it’s going to get better in 2022. Oh, it’s going to get better in 2023.” But it hasn’t.’
Eating disorder-related health visits — which include hospital stays, pediatrician visits, telehealth talk therapy, and everything in between — more than doubled among people younger than 17 in the past five years, according to a recent report from the data company Trilliant Health. From 2018 through mid-2022, visits among this age group jumped 107.4% across all eating disorders, from around 50,000 visits at the beginning of 2018 to more than 100,000 in 2022. Visits related to anorexia nervosa, which has the highest death rate of any mental illness, jumped 129.26%.