New survey results suggest that the availability of telehealth-based mental health services — and the high level of mental health symptoms Americans experienced during the pandemic — led more consumers to seek mental health care online than ever before during 2021.
The study, which was conducted by ZocDoc, draws on data tracking mental health appointment booking trends between January 2021 and January 2022. It showed that in 2020, as the pandemic began to crest, more than 42% of US adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, a striking increase of 93% over the previous year.
Demand for mental health services grew 11% year-over-year between 2019 and 2020, and a staggering 77% year-over-year between 2020 and 2021.
Virtual services seem to be the engine driving much of this growth. During the period studied by ZocDoc, virtual mental health specialty bookings grew by 74%. And by January 2022, 88% of mental health specialty bookings were virtual, researchers concluded. To put this in context, just 10% of bookings outside of mental health were virtual as of January 2022.
Among the groups most using telehealth-based mental health services are children where appointments grew by 81% during the year studied. Also, pediatric psychiatric medication review appointment bookings grew by 100%, and adolescent health bookings grew by 114%.
Within the adult population, alcoholism-related bookings grew by 43%, addiction-related bookings grew by 67%, disordered eating bookings grew by 53%. and anxiety-related bookings grew by 86%. In addition, psychotherapy intake/first appointment bookings grew by 107% and depression-related bookings were up by 92%
In addition, individual therapy visits relationship/couples therapy appointment bookings grew by 146% and family therapy appointment bookings shot by 187%.
While it seems obvious that at least some of the surging demand is driven by stresses related to the pandemic, there’s something larger going on here. Apparently, there’s a great deal of demand for mental health services that isn’t being met by the supply of offline services.
Also, these numbers suggest that patients may be more comfortable seeing their mental health clinician remotely. After all, given the sensitive nature of being diagnosed with a mental health issue, it may make the most sense for patients to be seen from the comfort of their homes.
As a family member of someone with a mental health condition, I can tell you that even people with excellent insurance can wait months to get a first appointment with a psychiatrist, and weeks to see a therapist. My experience in helping this person has been that when we turned to online mental health services, the wait for initial appointments was shorter and the administrative side of the business more efficient and organized than most private practices offline.
It’s still not clear to me why patients would be willing to go back casually to face-to-face visits to the doctors, even if nothing else the need to spend hours in the middle of what could very well be a workday to get their business done.
In any event, it seems clear that despite the large drop in telehealth uptake as the pandemic has ebbed, mental health services are on a different path. It will be interesting to see if they can keep adding capacity to meet this demand.
