Poll Finds 87% of US Adults Think Children Need More Mental Health Support
In a poll of 2,014 adults in the US, 87% believed that children need more mental health support. For over a decade, the editors of the BNN have been emphasizing the great need for earlier recognition and treatment of children with bipolar and related mood and behavioral disorders. With so many Americans in agreement, now could be the time to direct public health and research funds to the better support of children’s mental health. Sadly this does not yet seem to be the case, but this is an election year. We need stand-up leaders in Congress to marshal the resources to increase the well-being of current and future generations.
Treatment Research Needs More Advocacy
Among the hundreds of posters, workshops, clinical perspectives, and symposia presented over five days at the 2013 meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), there were almost no posters or presentations on new approaches to treatment (either with drugs or therapy) for children with bipolar disorder.
As we have repeatedly emphasized in the BNN and in research publications, this deficiency has adverse consequences for the many hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents in the US with unequivocal diagnoses of bipolar disorder. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death in adolescents 13 to 17 years of age in the US. Most of these young people have a mood disorder. Bipolar disorder carries with it not only a substantial risk of suicide, but also the potential for a lifetime of dysfunction, disability, and medical comorbidity if it is inadequately treated.
Please advocate for more treatment research for childhood onset bipolar disorder. A whole generation of children, their parents, and their physicians desperately need more treatment information.
