Child and adolescent mental health and social policy

Unfortunately, our society ignores most children with psychiatric issues, says Harold Koplewicz, MD, President of Child Mind Institute. He explains the negative effects this has on children with mental illness.

Transcript

00:00

I think as a nation we should be very upset over the fact that every year for the past five decades

00:06

we have lost 5,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 24 to suicide, and that 600,000 of them

00:14

make an attempt that's so serious every year that they land up in an emergency room. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:25

We ignore most kids who have psychiatric illness in the United States as evidenced by the fact

00:32

that we don't treat their insurance the same way. We don't respect the disease and the respect that we say,

00:39

oh, he's just willful, or he's lazy, or his mom is neglectful. And we would never do that if someone had a seizure

00:46

or if someone had asthma. And I think that since we don't give it its rightful attention,

00:54

when a terrible event occurs and someone had a history of psychiatric illness

01:00

or had a history of taking a pill for their psychiatric symptoms, it's very quick for the public

01:07

to make it cause and effect when that isn't the case. Just because two things are true doesn't mean

01:14

that one caused the other one. But I think that's the tip of the iceberg. I think the bigger part of the iceberg is that people with psychiatric illness that do not

01:22

get attention are less likely to be productive members of society. They're less likely to graduate high school.

01:30

They're less likely to get married. They're less likely to have great hobbies and to enjoy the recreational parts of life.

01:39

And that, as a nation, I think is the loss that we're experiencing. That if we're going to lose 5,000 teenagers every year,

01:47

if we're going to have a whole bunch of kids drop out of school, not because they're not academically or intellectually capable, it's just that they can't tolerate

01:56

the sitting, the waiting, the paying attention, that's a big expense. So whether you're a Democrat or a Republican,

02:04

this is just bad for our nation from a financial point of view and I think from a moral and ethical point of view.

02:10

We still only respond to these kinds of disorders when someone has killed themselves

02:17

and killed many, many other people. On a daily basis, we don't think about the child who

02:25

is failing in school or the child who starts to use marijuana not for recreational uses,

02:32

but is self-medicating, or the fact that 60% of our penal system have individuals

02:41

with a mental illness, and that 50% of the people with alcohol abuse have a mental illness, and 40% with substance abuse,

02:48

and 33% of the people who are homeless. And so I think that, unfortunately, we're

02:55

not tackling this the way we tackled polio. And I think this country is very capable of doing that.

03:02

And if you are old enough to remember AIDS, before Ronald Reagan refused to say the words.

03:10

But frankly, once the nation started talking about it and put all of their scientists to it,

03:18

we actually changed adolescent behavior. We got kids to start talking about condoms and safe sex.

03:25

And we found out it's a virus and how it's transmitted. And if we could do that for AIDS and we could do that for polio

03:34

when we got the March of Dimes going, I'm absolutely convinced that with that kind of concerted effort, this country

03:41

could tackle child and adolescent psychiatric disorders.