Great video on youth mental health produced by YoungMinds in the UK. But good advice for any country and its leadership.

“YoungMinds Very Important Kids (VIK), our national panel of young people with mental health problems, have launched a manifesto  and accompanying film to highlight to politicians the changes that need to be made to improve young people’s mental health.”

You can download the YoungMinds children and young people’s manifesto here

“Written in their words and including their own stories it covers 11 areas where they believe things must change so that all young people with mental health problems get the support they often so desperately need.”

Manifesto main points

1. Stigma still affects us; its about time we were able to talk about how we feel.
2. Dealing with problems when we are young; train primary school staff
3. Growing up is difficult; support us when changes happen in our lives
4. Getting what we need at secondary school; train everyone to understand teenagers problems.
5. Waiting lists and assessments just make it harder; make them shorter and provide us with one worker for all our care.
6. Some doctors don’t listen to us; they need to understand and support us
7. Going to Accident and Emergency can be traumatic; treat us with respect, see beyond our labels
8. Some psychiatric units feel like prisons; learn from the best ones
9. Someone to speak up for us; we all need advocates
10. Lost in the system; don’t forget about us when we are 16 plus
11. We’re the experts; start  listening to us

Happy Canada Day!!

Canada has a proud history of valuing health care as part of the fabric of this country and as a basic right for all citizens. However, despite our commitment to overall health care, our attention to mental health care is overdue.

In Canada, approximately 1 in 5 children and adolescents experience some form of mental disorder. Most major mental disorders begin prior to the age of 25, making this period a critical time for the promotion and treatment of mental health problems.

One of the key initiatives of the Mental Health Commission of Canada is to develop a Mental Health Strategy for Canada. As part of the strategy the Child and Youth Advisory Committee of the Mental Health Commission of Canada will support the development of a framework specific to the needs of child and youth mental health.

We need your help!!

We invite all Canadians to share their thoughts and opinions in an online survey about values and principles relating to child and youth mental health.

TAKE THE SURVEY NOW

The survey will take about 30 minutes to complete (but you can save your answers and come back to it at any time).

It is important that we get the thoughts and opinions from as many different people as possible. Please pass this information along to your network, family, friends, or anyone who you think should join this consultation.

Today is Child and Youth Mental Health Day - a national day of celebration dedicated to enhancing the awareness and understanding of the importance of youth mental health. The day of recognition is part of Mental Health Week (May 4-10).

Mental health is the positive balance of the social, physical, spiritual, economic and mental aspects of one’s life and is as important as physical health.

During adolescence youth travel through a period of major physical, emotional, social and vocational changes as they move from childhood into adulthood. Though the youth years are among the most physically healthy, they are also a time when mental illness most commonly develops. Therefore, it is important that youth engage in activities that help build self esteem, create positive family relationships, and stimulate their mental health as well as their physical health.

According to the World Health Organization, almost one-third of the global burden of disease in young people is due to neuropsychiatric disorders. In Canada it is estimated that 15 – 20 percent of children and youth suffer from a treatable mental disorder, yet only the minority of those in need (an estimated 20 percent) receive mental health services. No other such pressing health problem in Canada is so neglected.

It is also important that young people and their parents learn the warning signs that may signal when a problem is not just something that will go away or that can be overcome by health improvements. Sometimes problems are the first signs of a mental illness that can be effectively treated, particularly if it is caught early on. Mental health is everyone’s business. We all need to be informed

Teenmentalhealth.org is now an award-winning website! The site, which focuses on sharing knowledge about youth mental health and mental illness, won silver at the 2008 Web Health Awards.

“Teenmentalhealth.org is dedicated to providing information on youth mental health that is based on the best available scientific evidence, and this award recognizes our commitment to excellence,” say Dr. Stan Kutcher, Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health.

The Web Health Awards recognizes the best Web-based health-related content for consumers and professionals. The program is held twice a year — spring/summer and fall/winter — with the goal of providing a “seal of quality” for electronic health information.

“I was thrilled to collaborate with Dr. Kutcher and his team,” says Jennifer Ayotte of Impact Communications. “They had the vision to take a complex subject like teen mental health and present it in a state-of-the-art website that uses social media to build global community of support.”

Some of the website’s key mental health resources include: a guide to understanding teen depression, a guide to understanding evidence-based medicine, a booklet for siblings with a mental illness, various multimedia presentations, and free clinical tools for health professionals.

Teenagers are known for risk-taking, novelty seeking, reckless behaviour and impulsivity.

Risk-taking behaviour can take on many different forms, including the misuse of alcohol or drugs, engaging in unprotected sexual activity, some types of criminal activity or risky, adrenaline-producing sports like skydiving or motocross. While you may not have done all of these things, the majority of adolescents and young adults report participating in one or more risk-taking behaviours.

One reason for this is that the teenage brain is less able than the adult brain to inhibit impulsive behaviours. Adolescents become more able to control their behaviour as their brains mature, but efficient control of impulsive acts is not fully developed until adulthood. When teenagers are faced with a reward, the “reward” systems of their brains are disproportionately active compared to the “control” systems (which are later to mature). This makes it difficult for teenagers to be in command of their reward response, and makes them biased towards immediate gain over long-term gain.

A recent article on medicalnewstoday.com highlighted this shortsightedness of youth

According to popular stereotype, young teenagers are shortsighted, leaving them prone to poor judgment and risky decision-making when it comes to issues like taking drugs and having sex. Now a new study confirms that teens 16 and younger do think about the future less than adults, but explains that the reasons may have less to do with impulsivity and more to do with a desire to do something exciting.

Compared with adults, the researchers found, teenagers consider the future less and prefer immediate rewards over delayed ones (for example, $700 today versus $1,000 a year from now). But it may not be impulsivity that guides their lack of forethought. Instead, the study found that teens are shortsighted more due to immaturity in the brain systems that govern sensation seeking than to immaturity in the brain systems responsible for self-control.

While the origins of risk-taking behaviour in adolescents have been debated for a centuries and many explanations ranging from hormones to social pressures have been endorsed. But the truth is we are still not completely sure why adolescents and young adults are more prone to risk-taking behaviours.

We do however know that part of the answer lies in the way that brain development occurs during this part of the life-span and that risk-taking behaviors often decrease as the young person matures into adulthood. It’s the complex interplay amongst brain development, personality characteristics and the environment that lead to differences in risk-taking behavior amongst young people.

Interestingly, recent research suggests that the perception of risk does not vary greatly with age, but rather within the type of decision-making information that adolescents and adults use. So even though adolescents may be more prone to engage in risky behaviour, they are not irrational, unaware, or believe they are more invulnerable than adults. These findings suggest that young people certainly have the frontal lobe capabilities to self modulate risky behaviors – provided they understand how to do so.

(Great article from UC Davis Magazine about “What parents should tell college students about risky behavior . . . even if they don’t listen.”)

~ Dr. Stan Kutcher

In a greater effort to share mental health knowledge with families, youth, health professionals and educators teenmentalhealth.org is launching a new newsletter!

If you would like to received updates about the work of the Chair please sign up. Visit any page on our website (except the homepage) and on the left hand side you can join our mailing list.

Whenever we update parts of our site or find research or news related to youth mental health issues we’ll pass it along. But we promise not to do it too often

~ Dr. Stan Kutcher

Good article in today’s Herald by John Gillis.

Mental illness exacts a staggering toll in Canada, but many of its effects on individuals and society could be avoided, says a Halifax expert on adolescent mental health.

Caught early, the mental disorders that might otherwise derail young lives can be treated very effectively, said Dr. Stan Kutcher, an IWK Health Centre psychiatrist and Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health at Dalhousie University.

But often, that just doesn’t happen.

“There is a huge gap between the need and the capacity to meet that need,” he said. “That gap is at every single level.”

Dr. Kutcher said about 70 per cent of all mental disorders appear before a person reaches age 25.

And the figures on the fallout of those illnesses are “gobsmacking,” he said.

The World Health Organization says about a third of the burden of illness among young people worldwide is due to mental disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and panic.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada has said mental illness among working-age Canadians drains $51 billion each year from the economy in lost productivity.

Yet just a fraction of health spending goes toward mental health. This year in Nova Scotia, it was only about 3.5 per cent of the overall health budget, a smaller portion of which would go to child and youth mental health.

“Instead of paying at the back end, why don’t we pay at the front end?” said Dr. Kutcher, who is also a member of the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s child and youth advisory panel. “It’s actually a very simple thing to do.”

In many cases, mental health problems could be handled by family doctors, but as it stands, they’re often not well-trained or equipped to manage mental illness, he said.

And some children experiencing stress or anxiety could even learn coping skills through leaders at community organizations like Boys and Girls clubs or the YMCA, he said.

Teachers and other school staff could be trained to identify those with early signs of mental illness and steer them toward care.

In the absence of that early system of identification and management, there are few places for young people to get help except through places like the IWK, where services are geared toward the seriously ill, Dr. Kutcher said.

“Right now, we’re using very expensive resources to intervene for kids who don’t need that level of intervention and we have kids who need that level of intervention that can’t get it,” he said.

Visit the Herald for the rest of the article

A couple of months ago I was asked to do a webcast editorial for The Medscape Journal of Medicine. It went online today. Check it out (FYI - you’ll need a password to access the journal).

~ Dr. Kutcher