Even with some improvements to the nation’s mental health care system, a significant number of youth still receive little to no mental health care or get connected to the wrong kind, a recent study shows.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that fewer than half of young people with mental disorders receive adequate care. Those who met with a mental health care professional didn’t necessarily fare any better. According to the study, the number the children taking antidepressants significantly increased in a six-year timespan, and drug use especially expanded among young patients with “less severe to no mental impairment.”
Researchers gathered data by distributing surveys to parents of more than 50,000 children between the ages of six and 17 across the nation. Questions touched on child’s behavioral issues, medical diagnoses, and medications. “At minimum, this highlights that there are still high levels of unmet need for mental health care among young people,” Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health who didn’t work on the study, told The Verge.
This data comes at a time when national attention has turned to the mental wellbeing of young people, a group that’s more at risk of committing suicide than succumbing to HIV/AIDS, stoke, influenza, and lung disease combined. A recent study found that young black men in particular have mental health challenges. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says that half of all lifetime cases of mental disorders begin by the age of 14. For many youth, delays between diagnoses and treatment take years, sometimes up to a decade.
While lawmakers have been slow to pass legislation that would lay the foundation of a national mental health care system overhaul, a growing number of political leaders, health professionals, school administrators, and parents agree that it’s better to be proactive in treating mental and trauma-related illnesses, especially in children. Adults often miss opportunities to do that, misinterpreting changes in behavior as mischief, leaving one of three children who develop PTSD without care.
The question remains of how treatment would look. Advocates contend that the answer to securing effective, continuous mental health services for youth lies in the concerted efforts of parents, specialized mental health care providers, and primary care physicians. This framework, named the collaborative care model, would expand across the entire health care process — including diagnosis, treatment, surveillance, health communications, management, and support services — that allows parents to have more of a say in their child’s treatment.
Educators also want to bring mental health services straight to young people in educational institutions. In-school, wrap-around services, like those that have been implemented in some Baltimore City schools, provide a host of services that troubled students have difficulty accessing, including those related to mental health. The fight for school-based mental health assistance rages on in California, where a group of students and teachers recently sued the Compton Unified School District to get the resources they believe the Americans with Disabilities Act should guarantee.
The benefits of connecting young people to mental health resources go beyond health, affecting education, criminal justice, and other subject areas. Mental health experts say that untreated mental illnesses can become more severe, turning into another illness that’s even harder to treat. These ailments can also permeate other parts of a child’s life. Young people with mental disorders have a 50 percent greater likelihood of dropping out of school. Employment opportunities also come far and between for those with unaddressed mental health issues.
A growing body of research has also drawn a connection between untreated mental illness and mass incarceration. Seventy percent of the youth in the juvenile justice system — many of whom are there for minor crimes — have a mental illness. For some young people in the foster care system, there’s no respite from trauma and other unresolved mental health problems beyond copious amounts of mind-altering medication. Within the last year, some states — including Washington, Wyoming, New Jersey, and Illinois — have taken steps to reduce the prescription of mind-altering drugs to children by requiring that practitioners seek other options before doling out medication.
“What the experts tell us is… not enough resources are really directed at taking care of these kids and giving them the therapies and the intensive treatment that they need — not drugs,” CBS News Correspondent Werner said in March. “That’s a lot of time, that’s a lot of people to do that — therapists and counselors and doctors — and that of course all costs money.”
The recent report did have a silver lining. There was a decline in young people with severe mental illness, a deviation from previous studies that found an increase in the prevalence among children and teenagers. Researchers called it signs that parents have become more motivated in seeking mental health services for their children.