Is There an Increase in Mental Illness Among Children?

So I think there's two things that are going on, one I think we're getting better at recognizing and identifying children who are really into stress and dysfunction, and I think that is one of the reasons why today we have a much better nomenclature, so we're able to talk about attention deficit hyper activity sort of versus attention deficit sort of without hyper activity, we're are able to, as a nation to start thinking about depression as a real clinical illness among teenagers versus just been demoralized and yet there is one other area where we have changed the nomenclature and that has increased the number of kids that we see who have Autism spectrum disorder, when you add words like spectrum, and when you add words like disorder, the tent becomes very big so it's not an epidermic of autism, because we've always had children who have Autism, but we think of those as must be the character Dustin Huffman and Rain Man which is kind of a narrow description, and when you open up the nomenclature so that people who traditionally might have been very quacky or odd or people who had mental retardation or people who have social interaction problems to more or less degree start to fall under the spectrum, that's why we start seeing rates of 1 out of 88 births in the United States who meet the criteria.