In the first year of the pandemic, significantly more girls and boys in Bavaria suffered from depression. At the same time, their risk of abusing alcohol and drugs is particularly high.
According to an evaluation by the health insurance company DAK Bayern, depressed children and adolescents are particularly often additionally treated for alcohol or drug abuse in the pandemic year 2020. This emerges from the current children and youth report of the cash register for the Free State. According to this, 6.7 percent of all ten to 17-year-olds with diagnosed depression were diagnosed with addiction at least once within a year. In contrast, addiction was only documented in 0.6 percent of the students without depression. The risk for children suffering from depression to be treated for substance abuse is thus almost 13 times higher. In addition, according to the report, the connection between depression and addiction increased significantly by 21 percent compared to the previous year.
The DAK derives the results from data from almost 104,000 children and young people from Bavaria who are insured with the health insurance company. The report is thus based on almost five percent of all children and young people in Bavaria and is also representative in terms of age and gender distribution. However, with regard to both depression and addictive substances, only those patients who are being treated by doctors are included in the statistics.
In contrast to the younger age groups, according to the report, the psychological stress on young people increased so much during the pandemic that significantly more girls and boys fell ill with depression in the course of 2020. The increase among 15 to 17-year-olds in Bavaria, at a good eleven percent, is greater than the national average of just under eight percent. At the same time, in the first year of the pandemic, almost six out of 1,000 children and young people aged ten and over with DAK insurance received medical treatment for abusing alcohol, tobacco, hashish or hard drugs. This proportion has fallen sharply by 27 percent; in the case of alcohol, the decline was even greater, at minus 36 percent.
The data also shows that addiction is a family disease. If one parent is also addicted, the risk for the offspring increases significantly. A personality disorder, depression or a chronic illness in a parent increases the risk for their children to reach for cigarettes, bottles or other drugs.