2024-09-19 11:00:02
It is impossible to ignore: more than one in six children suffer from a mental disorder such as anxiety disorders, mood disorders, autism spectrum disorders or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Overwhelmed caregivers and months of waiting for an appointment leave children and their families feeling distressed and abandoned.
An undiagnosed and untreated mental disorder during childhood is a major risk for academic failure, a disrupted emotional life and violence against oneself (self-harm, suicide) or suffered (harassment, physical/sexual violence). Suicide is the second leading cause of death among children and adolescents in France.
It is tempting to minimize the frequency of mental disorders among young people, considering them as a passing fad. However, numerous French (Enabee, Santé publique France, 2022) and international (Global Burden of Disease, IHME, 2023) studies confirm their prevalence.
Ignorance of the high prevalence of disorders
Did you know that 70 to 80% of adult mental disorders begin before the age of 18? These figures, although striking, underestimate the reality by only considering the most serious cases and excluding those who do not dare to reveal their suffering. Imagine: in a high school class, an average of five children suffer from a mental disorder. In primary school, nearly one child in a hundred has already attempted suicide.
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A pernicious semantic shift has reduced mental health to mental illness. For decades, public policies have been developing a health approach derived from the rare disease model, focusing on treatment rather than prevention, ignoring the high prevalence of disorders. We cannot apply the same strategies to disorders that affect 1/100,000 children as to those that affect 1/6 of them.
These policies fail in three ways: reducing mental health to mental illness fuels the stigmatization of children and their families by opposing the WHO definition of mental well-being as a priority; the lack of effective prevention, detection and early intervention leads to increased difficulties throughout life, weighing on individual trajectories and the health system; finally, the delegation of responsibility for mental health to health professionals alone, who are often unavailable, abandons parents and childhood professionals in the face of the suffering they perceive.
The four major measures to take
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