What Does the Funding for Children's Mental Health Look Like? (1:07)
Child psychiatry only gets a very small piece of the budget for the National Institute of Mental Health says HealthMaker Harold Koplewicz, MD, President of Child Mind Institute. In this video, he explains why this doesn't really make sense.
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I think the issue at hand here, is how we're treating 15 million children and teenagers in the United States, who have very real, very common, and very treatable disease, and we are not investing very much in that problem. The CDC reports that we spend almost $250 billion a year, taking care of these kids, whether it's jail, whether it's disability payments, and yet we're spending about $240 million on preventive research.
And if you look at the National Institute of Health budget only 1.5 billion out of a budget of 30 billion goes to National Institute of Mental Health and child psychiatry gets the tiniest piece of this and if you think about the bank for the buck, if 75% of all serious psychiatric illness occurs before the age of 24, and these kids turn into adults with psychiatric illness and many other core more bit problems then this is a bad investment.
Harold Koplewicz is founding President of the Child Mind Institute. He is a strong advocate for child mental health and one of the nation's leading child and adolescent psychiatrists.
