Aa steadily growing number of young children and teenagers in Greece are increasingly faced with depression and other issues due to the ongoing crisis, psychologists report.

Anxiety about their parents’ unemployment and difficult everyday conditions plagues children with insomnia, stress, persistent headaches, abdominal pain, nail biting, unusually sore limbs and melancholy.

At just the Karamandanio Hospital of Patras, medical cases requiring a child psychiatrist have increased by 40% within the last two years caused mainly due to problems related to the country’s economic crisis.

Child psychologists and psychiatrists report cases of 9-year-olds with depression symptoms. The chief of the Karamandanio hospital,  pediatrician Ioannis Yiannakopoulos told Greek daily Typos tis Kyriakis that 200 children visited the psychiatry ward in January 2013, which raises concerns.

Their age varied from 3-16. According to the data, 1,420 children asked for psychological help and support in 2010, while the number climbed to 2,000 in 2012. “There has been an increase of 38% over the last two years and we fear that more children will need help in the future. In fact, specialists underline that symptoms experienced by children today are crueler than before,” said Yiannakopoulos.

Yiannis Kouros, president of the Association of Psychology and Psychiatry for Adults Children (A.P.P.A.C.) told the Greek daily that the phenomenon affects mostly 12-year old children, who show a melancholic mood, are particularly whiney and emotional, and suffer from insomnia. “Children tend to be very introvert. They do not want to go outside because their trousers are old. Having to live with less due to the economic crisis is taking a toll on their psychology. They cannot have anymore what they used to have before.”

More and more parents are concerned about their childrens’ well-being and turn to medical experts for advice. The majority of them, however, prefers listening to the psychologists over the phone rather than directly visiting them.”They cannot afford visiting us. So they have to come up with a different solution to help their troubled child, and that’s through the telephone” added Kouros.

Stavroula Karagianni, Director of the psychiatry unit of Childrens’ Hospital Panayiotis and Aglaia Kyriakou in Athens, confirmed the rising tendency of children psychiatric cases but noted that this could be the result of some psychiatric clinics for children shutting down lately.