Behavioral Health Diagnoses and Health Care Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Objective: Emerging evidence has suggested a population-wide worsening of psychiatric symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among individuals with preexisting mental health conditions. The authors investigated whether reported behavioral health problems are being identified and treated.

Methods: This observational cohort study retrospectively compared Medicaid data of patients from the first year of the pandemic (2020) in the United States (N=1,589,111 patients) with the corresponding data from the year before (2019; N=1,715,872 patients).