Children and Mental Health Stats

Found this blog post by author and psychologist Helene Guldberg, Ph.D. on the Psychology Today site. As you can guess from the spelling below, she’s British.

The World Health Organization (WHO) 2001 report entitled Mental Health: New Understanding, New Hope claims that between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of young people suffer from mental health or behavioural disorders. Hans Troedsson, WHO director for child and adolescent health, later warned: ‘The international health community is concerned about the mental health status of our young. It is a time-bomb that is ticking and without the right action now millions of our children growing up will feel the effects’.

These are frightening figures. But, looking beyond the press releases to life as it is lived by young people, I wonder how we can possibly be in the grip of an epidemic of misery and self-abuse on the scale implied by today’s reports and campaigns. It is far from obvious to me that today’s youth are any more miserable or badly behaved than my generation were; and when studies set out to quantify the depths of this misery and the extent to which it has grown we should hardly be surprised if they find what they are looking for.

What is true is that many more children and young people are on anti-depressants and other forms of medication today, particularly in the US but also in Britain and other parts of Europe.

But the evidence for an actual increase in emotional and behaviour disorders is questionable. As I argue in Reclaiming Childhood:freedom and play in an age of fear higher reported figures can be explained by doctors stretching the label of depression to cover an ever wider range of unhappiness. In addition, parents are today less willing to tolerate variations in how their children behave, often overreacting to peculiar behaviours and mood swings.

Sami Timimi, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist said: ‘[M]ore childhood behaviours previously considered normal are now seen as problematic, and problematic behaviours are more likely to be medicalised … The increase in rates of childhood depression in Western society may reflect a lowering of the threshold for the diagnosis’.