The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Caught in quicksand: young people and mental health > Comments

Caught in quicksand: young people and mental health : Comments

By Ann Crago, Kevin Meeham and Kathleen Stacey, published 17/10/2005

Ann Crago et al argue mental health services for adolescents are only any good if you are the right age and live in the right postcode.

  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All
What are the main problems with youth and mental health?.
Are only the symptoms, and not the main causes being addressed?

EG
The US Department of Health and Human Services summarizes the risks of single parent families:
"More than a quarter of American children—nearly 17 million—do not live with their father. Girls without a father in their life are two and a half times as likely to get pregnant and 53 percent more likely to commit suicide. Boys without a father in their life are 63 percent more likely to run away and 37 percent more likely to abuse drugs. Both girls and boys are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to end up in jail and nearly four times as likely to need help for emotional or behavioral problems."
http://www.gocrc.com/research/dangers-of-sole-custody.html

Children born out of wedlock or whose parents divorce are much more likely to experience poverty, abuse, and behavioral and emotional problems, have lower academic achievement, and use drugs more often.
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/marriage/index.cfm

Children growing up in single-parent households are twice as likely to suffer a mental illness, commit suicide or develop an alcohol-related disease than children who live with both parents, a study has found.
More than one in five Australian families have only one parent, according to the 2001 census.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/24/1042911549349.html

With so much evidence from so many studies, why should people have to ignore it forever?

Between 40% to 50% of marriages end in divorce, with the rate of separation in de facto relationships being much higher. If children are involved, about 90% of the time they will live with their mothers, and be effectively removed from their fathers. The results of this exercise on the mental health of those children can be quite devastating.

It becomes difficult to believe that people such as teachers, youth workers, counsellors etc can fix the problems for so many young people, as they cannot put back their family, or replace their fathers. They can only try and fix the symptoms, but they can never fix the real problems.
Posted by Timkins, Monday, 17 October 2005 11:04:55 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Increasing depression among young people is real, and it most certainly needs attention. It is interesting to note, though, that reported increases in youth depression and suicide co-incide with reported increases in the use of depressant drugs such as alcohol and other illicit substances by young people.
Posted by Leigh, Monday, 17 October 2005 11:44:33 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I was close to suicide at age 23 and age 28-29. However, I didn't share my feelings with anyone, no-one was aware of my plight. (The first episode ended when a car ran me down, the second when a very astute lady realised what was happening and began to address it.) So whatever facilities were available, I wouldn't have been referred to them.

More recently, I experienced a prolonged period of severe/extreme depression. One of the main problems in this state is in general that those who haven't experienced it don't understand it, can't relate to your behaviour and don't know how to help. My wife and kids gave me great support, but even they often did not realise the depth of the illness and its impact on my behaviour.

So often the critical thing for depressed young people is to find a point of contact, preferably someone who understands from the inside, who can relate to their experience. One such resource is depressioNet (www.depressionet.com.au), which is a great first port of call for those who are depressed. You can expose yourself here with anonymity, with no fear of rejection or adverse repercussions, and get immediate responses from present or past sufferers and from trained staff. Others on the site can give you positive advice and relate it to their own experiences. Given that major issues in depression are feelings of isolation, alienation, helplessness and hopelessness, this can be a tremendous help. It can also alert sufferers to the availability and merits of deeper levels of help. Initiatives such as this one (which is in need of funding) can be very cost-effective.
Posted by Faustino, Monday, 17 October 2005 12:00:18 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Crago et al are to be commended for drawing attention to what is a long-neglected area of mental health services. I also agree that there is gross inequity about provision of such services that do exist. However, I'm not overly hopeful that this situation will change for the better under current Federal and State Health regimes.

Also, while mental health problems among young people are undoubtedly correlated with family breakdown, this does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. For example, I'm sure that stable and intact families do better than broken or single-parent families on just about any social or health indicator, if only because the dysfunctional families and relationships are in themselves indicative that the family was in big trouble prior to separation.

In the case of children and adolescents who undergo the trauma of family breakdown, while they have often had to cope with being utilised as pawns by their dysfunctional parents, they have the advantage of being removed from what were often violent and/or abusive families. Since it has become easier for adults in abusive relationships to extricate themselves from them, it is very likely that those who find themselves in that unfortunate situation will do so, rather than stay in a hopeless marriage where the abuse continues behind closed doors. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that descriptive statistics will favour those marriages and relationships that endure.

Those who like to pluck statistics indiscriminately from the Internet to bolster their spurious and self-serving arguments would do well to remember a golden rule from Stats 101: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!
Posted by mahatma duck, Monday, 17 October 2005 1:22:29 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Mahatma Duck,
You are spurious
You are self-serving.
You do not remember any golden rules.

In the past you have directly called other posters many maligning names, and you have made an enormous number of unsubstantiated inferences about them. You continue to do the same, but now, you do not refer to other posters directly by their forum name. I think you have the most minimal levels of creditability and honesty, Mahatma Duck.

There is a common myth that family problems are mostly due to “violence”. They are not.

Indeed the most recent study by Relationship Australia, the “2003 Relationships Survey Indicator” http://www.relationships.com.au/utilities/about/ri2003exec_summ.pdf lists “Issues Negatively Influencing Partner Relationship”. It has 18 categories, with “violence” at the very bottom of the list at 2%.

Quite a few studies into the reasons for divorce also find the majority of divorces were for non-violent reasons, with many people now believing that those divorces or separations need not have occurred. However none of that is of much use to the children involved, as their father is still removed from their lives, they are often plunged into poverty, they are often highly distressed by the situation etc.

Authors,
This article is like so many other articles on the mental health system. It says that there is a mental health problem, and there needs to be more money spent.

Why?

What is causing all this mental illness?

If someone doesn’t know what is causing all this mental illness, (or they are unwilling to state it), then why should they be given more money?

In the summaries of the studies I listed in an earlier post, those studies involved up to 1 million children, or were the summaries of many longitudinal studies undertaken into children’s wellbeing. The results are invariably the same. If children are exposed to too much family breakdown and removed from their father, they will have more mental illness.

But there are people who do not seem to want to acknowledge this, when it is so conclusive. So why should they be given more taxpayers money, to help overcome children’s mental illness?
Posted by Timkins, Monday, 17 October 2005 2:31:41 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Timkins - parroting accurate comments about your arguments and trying to turn them into personal insults just makes you look silly. It certainly doesn't enhance your credibility, such that it is.

The article is about deficiencies in the provision of mental health services for adolescents, but you want to divert the discussion to your pet topic, i.e. that divorce, instigated by feminists, is responsible for nearly all of our society's problems.

Do you have any comments that pertain to the actual subject of the article?
Posted by mahatma duck, Monday, 17 October 2005 4:53:10 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy