The CDC reported in a National Health Interview Survey for the year 2021 that 15% of children between the ages of 5-17 reported to have received mental health treatment.
Mental health treatment conducted in the study included the use of prescribed medication, therapy, or a combination of both.
This report comes around the same time the San Luis Obispo County Grand Jury chose to look at how well our high schools are doing at addressing mental health.
While the study concluded that schools throughout the county were doing enough to help students seek mental health treatment, they also assessed that students were more likely to experience depression and anxiety post-COVID without the necessary tools needed for a mental health crisis.
“We have a team that is being trained in assessing young people with severe emotional disturbance or severe mental illness,” SLO County Behavior Health Division Manager Frank Warren said. “It's usually the first part of treatment is finding out exactly what the needs are and what the right course of treatment will be.”
While 15% might seem like a high percentage, therapists attribute this to open conversation between parents and their children. Open discussions are being had about mental health status.
“There's a lot of reasons why young people are seeking help now,” Warren continued. “One of those is that we're talking more openly about it. We're reducing stigma. Another is that young people are going through things now that we didn't really expect them to be going through ten years ago. The pandemic certainly had an impact on socialization and isolation, and that brought out a lot of young people seeking help and needs for help that we weren't seeing in those years prior.”
Balance Kids Program Director Caroline Robinson said that adolescents nowadays are losing their innocence faster than usual at the hands of social media.
“I think the positive note is that mental health has to do with the brain… but we're talking a lot about neurochemicals and balance in the brain and what's encouraging about that is the brain is one of the most malleable organs,” Robinson said. “It's constantly changing depending on the inputs so there is absolutely every reason that kids can recover.”
