Millions of US children are living with mental health disorders.  Worse, the amount of healthcare costs associated with these conditions is skyrocketing.  That’s to say nothing of the incidental costs that sufferers will endure.

The breakdown of 3 to 17 year old children goes like this:  Out of the general population, ADHD accounts for 7%, behavioral and conduct disorders account for 3.5 percent, anxiety 3 percent, depression 2 percent, autism 1 percent, and Tourette’s 0.2 percent. 

Among adolescents aged 12-17, 5 percent report having used an illicit drug in the past year, more than 4 percent admitted to using alcohol, and nearly 3 percent reported cigarette dependence.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among children aged 12-17.

"Millions of children in the U.S. have mental disorders that affect their overall health and present challenges for their loved ones. In addition, the financial costs of childhood mental disorders are at least an estimated $247 billion each year," Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a news release. "We are working to both increase our understanding of these disorders, and help scale up programs and strategies to promote children's mental health so that our children grow to lead productive, healthy lives."

As if these stats weren’t sad enough, there is virtually no effort whatsoever to catch mental health problems early or prevent them altogether.  Our organization, Pursuit of Happiness, has been fighting behind the scenes with your schools and the stewards of your children to implement mental health checkups.  But the schools have had virtually no appetite to implement a program like this into their schools.  They tell us that “parents don’t want this” or “we’ll just be more aware.” 

Right now 4 out of 5 children who have diagnosable mental health conditions are receiving no treatment whatsoever.  Our society has our heads in the sand when it comes to mental illness. 

Dr. Ruth Perou, the team leader for childhood development studies at the CDC had this to say.  "The good news is that mental disorders are diagnosable and treatable.  If we act early, we can really make a huge difference in children's live and in families' lives overall."

What can you do?  Call or write to your school or school board or city council.  Demand the school does the right thing.  Pursuit of Happiness has a donation program where you can donate money so that qualifying families in need can receive free mental health services where they may not have previously had any opportunity to receive such services.  Do something!

This fight will be lost unless the public begins to demand these types of programs.  But the real losers will be our children.  

Chase Chick MPA LPC is CEO and co-founder of Beyond the Gray Sky, whose brands include Pursuit of Happiness, Dallas Psychology Review, and Luxe Media Productions.

DSM has long been the standard for mental health diagnosis.  Those days may be coming to an end.

With the release of DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association has expanded diagnostic criteria in such a way that many researchers say that the they will no longer use the DSM to diagnose. 

The APA has long had a history of controversy.  From their continued self-interjection into the political sphere, to adding and subtracting various diagnoses based on personal beliefs, the APA may have finally outgrown their usefulness.  The latest DSM is tantamount to this fact.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has already issued a statement that they will no longer rely on DSM for their research.  NIMH director had this to say.  "The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever."

What a bombshell.

A petition by various physicians around the world is up to over 15,000 signatures protesting the release of the new manual.  Their protests range from the lowering of diagnostic standards, making disorder out of those who disorder may not be present, to the sheer lack of medical and physiological theory, a stepping stone in psychology that the APA has too long ignored.

Now there is a new effort brewing from the NIMH, the Research Domain Criteria or RDoC.  The new effort promises to take all the shortcomings of the DSM into account, and could revolutionize the way we view mental disorder.  It introduces scores of brain research, cognitive theory, and genetics into a manual that is based not on the whims of biased psychiatrists, but the science of real researchers who pursue truth of the mind.

This controversy is not likely to die down.  And with a competing product nearing the horizon, it remains to be seen how the future of mental health diagnosis will shape up.

Chase Chick MPA LPC is CEO and co-founder of Beyond the Gray Sky, whose brands include Pursuit of Happiness, Dallas Psychology Review, and Luxe Media Productions.