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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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?

Timkins, MD - the root causes of my depression certainly go back to my response to a (non-violent) family break up around my second birthday, when I physically lost my father and emotionally lost my mother (though I didn't find this out until after my two suicidal episodes). It's certainly worth knowing whether there are steps which might be taken to reduce the later onset of depression if much of it is related to societal issues such as those raised by Timkins. But that doesn't, of course, lessen the need to deal with those currently depressed or at risk.

Faustino...THANX... that frank admission is in line with what Timkins is saying, and what duck 'should' be saying.

Much of our mental illness is symptomatic of social breakdown and our fleeing from the family values of former years.

A strong family, with a values framework that upbuilds, supports and cares, and most of all gives hope, is pretty much a guarantee against depression.

Unfulfilled or unrealistic aspirations, based on distortions from the media (which are trying to sell us things) about how things are or should be, contribute to depression, when there is little family support for the individual.

It amazes me that we have wings, feathers, flat bills, webbed feet, and float in water, make quacking sounds yet no one is calling us 'ducks'. Social decay is happening at an accellarating rate, enduring values are fragmented and disowned by those who should be promoting them. 'greed' is not just good, its the catchcry of a generation. But bankrupt academics, wandering social commentators, and make it up as u go philosophers can only see symptoms.

Lets stop treating the symptoms, and return to our 'father' from the far land where after expending our social inheritance on loose living, the only food we had were the pigs slops.
Like the prodigal son, we should return to our Creator with the confession "We are not worthy to be called your children"... only to find His open arms waiting, the fatted calf prepared for a feast, and a signet ring placed on our finger.

There is a Christ shaped hole in each one of us, I hope we all fill it with the only One who can fit.

DB, Timkins - you might be interested in my resposne to Nick Gruen's article "How are we going? Happy?" if you haven't seen it.

Those who wish to push their own personal agendas rather than addressing the content of the article are seemingly unaware of the pressures that are brought to bear on families when they have a mentally ill adolescent child.

Under a couple of decades of policies of deinstitutionalisation of mentally ill people, it is families who often bear the brunt of caring for children with psychiatric illnesses. Within families it typically falls to mothers to provide care for sick children, on top of their disproportionate contribution to domestic responsibilities. Where there are inadequate or nonexistent external mental health services, this can create intolerable stresses on families which can break under the load of trying to care for a child with chronic, stigmatizing illness.

Of course family breakdown can induce or exacerbate mental health problems in kids - as it evidently can among adults, some of whom seem to use this forum as a form of therapy. However, that was not the subject of the article. Do any of the barrow-pushers have any comments that actually address the content of the article?

Mahatma Duck,
You wish to push your own personal agendas
You rather not address the content of the article
You are seemingly unaware.
You seem to use this forum as a form of therapy.
You are not the subject of the article.
You are a barrow-pusher.
You have no comments that actually address the content of the article

It is ironic that you have made many posts that have nothing at all (i.e. zilch) to do with the topic, and you have made those posts to specifically name-call and malign other posters, and now you seem to want to make generalised maligning statements about other posters, without addressing them specifically.

The authors want more money from the taxpayer. Many people want that, but I am rather suspicious of mental health workers, because I have heard that their success rate is rather low. Mental health could become a thriving industry, where many mental health workers are employed, and most of it becomes taxpayer funded, but the success rate of those mental health workers is actually quite low.

The authors do not give specific details of what is causing so much mental illness in young people. That is suspicious to start with, and if they don’t know what is causing so much mental illness, (or are unwilling to say it), then why should they be given more taxpayers money? They could do more harm than good with that taxpayer’s money.

Overall, I think the authors are sidestepping many issues, are not properly informing the public of why there is so much mental illness amongst young people, are avoiding mentioning what appears to be the no1 problem for young people (i.e. family breakdown), are trying to hide the fact that the success rate for mental health workers is not that great, are wanting more from the taxpayers pocket, but are not telling the taxpayer of how they intend to spend their money.

If they want more money from the taxpayer, they would have to supply better details of exactly how they are going to spend that money.

More parrot-like prattling, designed to disguise the commentator's ignorance about inequities and deficiencies in adolescent mental health services.

I note that our valiant advocate for the family has failed completely to address the burdens placed upon families of mentally ill adolescents by inadequate and inequitable services.

Oh that's right - there were no mentally ill children before second-wave feminism or deinstitutionalisation.

Mahatma Duck,
You carry out parrot-like prattling.
You try and disguise your ignorance.
You believe there are inequities and deficiencies in adolescent mental health services.
You have failed completely.
You believe there are burdens placed upon families of mentally ill adolescents.
You believe there were no mentally ill children before second-wave feminism or deinstitutionalisation.

Repeated name-calling and making generalised maligning inferences about someone is a form of “bullying”, and if such bullying is being carried out on a young person (eg in the schoolyard, at sports etc) then it can be quite distressing for them. The authors have not mentioned this, nor have they really mentioned many other causes for mental or emotional problems in young people.

You have not mentioned bullying as being a potential problem either, probably because you carry out so much of it yourself, through repeated flaming, name-calling and making maligning statements about other posters, and about 80% of your posts are normally taken up with this.

I have read over the years of various accounts of the effectiveness of mental health work, and I think it true to say that mental health treatment is not an exact science by any means. The success rate is often not much more than reading a self-help book, and prescribing drugs etc seems to be of little use in many cases, and can have many detrimental side-effects.

The authors want teachers to become more involved, but we are seeing so many children turned out of the school system hardly able to read or write, so it is questionable as to whether teachers would be al that useful in identifying or treating mental illness.

Even a good mental health worker could only treat the symptoms at best, but seldom fix the underlying problems.

If the authors want to spend more of the taxpayers money, they would have to say exactly how, when, where and why, or give some type of a guarantee that what they intend to do with the taxpayer’s money will actually work, and not be a waste of the taxpayer’s money.

I work for a child and youth mental health service. While they struggle with many issues such as identity, family, relationships, community and mental health our young clients are often seen in isolation for therapy with minimal involvement with family. Across the spectrum of mental illness, if as a therapist you are asking people to change or cope it is my opinion that family is key to this as a goal. Transition from a child service to an adult service should be coordinated and facilitated with all stakeholders involved. I think it is not a matter of throwing more money at the problem but facilitating a smooth transition and asking adult services to consider the developmental needs of their younger clients. Perhaps this could be achieved by a measured transition to an adult service with input from family, friends,mental health workers on both sides of the fence and of course the young person themselves to set reasonable goals and expectations for the type of service they want and have a right to expect. The system is not perfect and there is a lack of social justice at times but unless people advocate for themselves or have advocates systems won't change. Community and client education about there rights to service and responsibilities they have to themselves and others may also assist. All of this is off the top of my head, I am optimistic and believe that resignation to poor service serves among other things to perpetuate it.

What are the underlying causes of mental illness amongst young people?

As a young person - twenty years old - I feel that my own mental illness (an anxiety disorder) stems from three things: experimentation with illicit drugs; pressure from peers to be greedy & "successful" in a material form; and a lack of ethical intsruction from role models within the Australian community. Feeling disenfranchised leads to depression. Feeling confused and conflicted about one's own values and how they fit into mainstream society can lead to anxiety.

Inside my family unit growing up, certain ethical ideals and behaviours were developed, however the shock of the "real world" - the experience of leaving home, going to Uni and working various jobs to survive - triggered a mental/nervous breakdown. I felt at the time that there was no infrastructure in place to support me - basically I felt that my community had been "swallowed whole" by the interests of commercial and corporate enterprise. Interests which did not care if I lived or died. I had a serious case of disillusionment. Most uni-students do - but coupled with paranoid delusions - I found living my own life dangerous and untenable, untill I finally admitted that I needed help.

What I would like to do for other kids who may suffer like I have suffered, is simply to remind them that "community" still exists in Australia. People still live within ethical codes and it is OK to trust people and strangers. We do not have to be isolated from one another. And "say no" to drugs.