Number of Children Receiving Psychiatric Care in Czechia Has Doubled Over the Past Decade

The number of children and young people requiring psychiatric hospitalization in Czechia has more than doubled over the past decade. This is according to an analysis by the Europe in Data portal: in 2024, nearly 67,000 people under the age of 20 received outpatient psychiatric care, while more than 5,000 required emergency hospitalization.

Between 2010 and 2024, the number of outpatient psychiatric consultations rose by more than 60%, while the number of hospitalizations over roughly the same period more than doubled. The Czech trend mirrors a broader European pattern: according to the World Health Organization, in 2023 mental health disorders were recorded in nearly 14% of adolescents in Europe, compared with around 10% in 2000.

Help arrives too late

Mental health experts say one of the key problems is that children reach specialists too late, once their condition has already worsened. "The system often doesn't respond until problems escalate into a crisis," says Barbora Přeničková, a representative of the Czech organization Nevypusť duši. She notes that long waiting times to see specialists, along with blurred responsibility between schools, the healthcare system, and social services, only make things worse.

Přeničková believes teachers and other adults who regularly interact with children need better training to recognize warning signs, know how to start a supportive conversation, and understand where to refer a child for further help.

Girls suffer more

Surveys confirm the scale of the problem. As part of the "Let's Listen to Children When They Talk to Us" project, around 4,700 high school students were surveyed — 65% of them rated their overall well-being as poor.

Girls emerged as a particularly vulnerable group. According to the 2022 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study, 43% of Czech 15-year-old girls reported feeling down more than once a week, compared with 19% of boys the same age. Persistent feelings of loneliness were reported by 31% of girls and 15% of boys.

Problematic social media use was identified in 9% of fifteen-year-old girls and 4% of boys. According to Přeničková, girls tend to use social media more for building relationships and self-presentation, which makes them more vulnerable to comparison with others, pressure to meet appearance standards, peer judgment, and sexualized harassment.

That said, the data itself does not prove that social media is the direct cause of the overall rise in requests for psychiatric help. According to the WHO, depression, anxiety, and behavioral disorders remain among the leading health issues affecting adolescents, and experts stress that a wide range of factors influence young people's mental health.

Source: expats.cz