Depressed children deserve better treatment

When children fall into a state of depression or show the tell-tale marks of self-harm, their anxious parents need fast access to specialist mental health advice. But as our story shows today, such expertise is simply not available to thousands of families across the country. Today we reveal that the government knows that it will be unable to meet its targets for providing care to these most vulnerable children and young people when they fall ill and that there is a huge variation in provision across England. In the County Durham and Tees Valley region, only 40 per cent of parents could expect a rapid response if their teenager was in mental turmoil. This is shameful. So, too, is the fact that one-quarter of 16- and 17-year-olds needing psychiatric care are likely to end up in adult wards - environments which can be both dangerous and disturbing for a teenager.

Children's and young people's psychiatric problems have always been neglected, an indication of our failure to accept that the young can suffer psychological turmoil. But, in fact, the evidence is that mental health problems are on the increase among our children. Around one million under-18s are estimated to experience some mental health problems, and over the last few years there have been increases in self-harm, conditions related to anxiety and conduct problems connected with autism and severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

What is obvious to those in the field is that deficits incurred by the large teaching hospitals in their relentless drive to lower waiting lists for surgery are now threatening mental health services, stalling development. The government must first of all acknowledge this and then urgently review what is happening to child and adolescent mental health teams with the aim of providing care that is more family-centred.

But to push mental health up the agenda will also require political will. Provision of therapy or counselling to an adolescent with crippling depression is as important as provision of hip or cataract operations. Yet, at the moment, these young people are having to wait twice as long as those on the average hospital waiting list. For a young person in turmoil, that is quite a hard discrepancy to understand.

Leader
23 July 2006

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1826996,00.html

 
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